Transitions, transitions

Most of us thought we’d spend our whole lives in academia. So when it turns out we won’t — whether we learn that we don’t want to, don’t get a job that actually pays the bills, or hit a roadbump along the way — it feels particularly craptastic. This is true even if we’re planning to stay but are having to rethink our relationship to academia. So this is a space for talking about the kinds of things that come up for people and how we can move past them.

I work, therefore I am

Sometimes I think the hardest part of the whole do-I-leave-academia-or-not conversation is grappling with the ways this choice affects our very identity.

People have written ad nauseum about the ways Americans identify with their jobs, and that goes double for careers like academia that both entail a long apprenticeship period and are engaged as vocations more than careers.

By the time we get to the end of graduate school, and often long before, there’s a sense of in and out, us and them. Moreover, we identify ourselves with the specificities of our work. We’re Foucauldians working on the philosophy of the self. We’re Victorianists. We’re vacuum physicists. And most of all, we’re academics.

And then it’s all in question

When we think about leaving, we are considering the possibility that we might have to take off that mantle and do the hard work of reconceiving of who we are. The more we’re identified, internally, with academia, the harder it is to contemplate leaving and the more painful actually doing it is.

The same is true of any change that affects our sense of who we are in the world – even if the change is good. Getting that tenure track job and having to step into the identity of “professor” can be as disorienting as leaving. But disorientation plus loss equals terror.

And in that terror, we can be utterly, completely convinced that we’ve made the wrong choice. It has to be the wrong choice, right? It feels too terrible to be right.

Even the right choice will feel like crap for a while

The not very fun truth is that every transition – no matter how much you want it, no matter how much it’s the right decision for you – will start off with loss and feeling like shit. It has to. You have to let go of the old identity before you can put a new one on.

Getting married to the partner of your dreams will entail some losses. Having a long-longed-for kid will entail some losses. Hell, finishing your dissertation and moving into a job, even a coveted tenure-track one, will entail a whole host of losses, including of guidance, of a cohort, of friends and support systems, of what is known.

And if you’re stepping out of academia, your losses may well be significant. You might be losing a dream you had for yourself. You might be losing friends and colleagues who don’t know how to relate to you outside of the structure of academia. You might be losing  work you found meaningful. You’re likely losing a sense of exactly who you are.

And then it will feel rudderless

After the acutely sucky period (and sometimes intermingled with it), you’ll get the terrifying rudderless period. William Bridges calls this period of transition “the neutral zone,” and I’m sorry, that’s just much too nice a word for this period.

In the middle of the transition, you will have a time when you have no fucking clue what’s supposed to happen next or where you’re going to end up or what you’ll be doing in six months time or where you’ll even be living but it’ll probably be under a bridge somewhere.

If you’re leaving academia, you’ll probably be overwhelmed by trying to figure out what to apply for and how and where and anyway, do you include pubs on your resume? You’ll probably vacillate between “I could do anything – how the hell do I figure out what?!” and “I can’t do anything – no one in their right mind is going to hire me!”

And finally, the new identity will develop

And then, like the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, the proverbial dawn after the dark, you will gain a direction, and you will gather around yourself a new life, and you will settle in to your new identity. At first it’ll feel kind of awkward, but also kind of exciting, and you will be full of possibility. And then it will feel awkward again, and exciting, and strange, and kind of weird, but fun.

It really will happen. It can’t really help happening, because it’s as necessary and true a part of the transition as the sucky part and the scary part.

Every one of these stages is important. Every one of them is necessary. And every one of them means you’re on the right track.

If you’d like some help figuring out what else you might be able to do, Jo Van Every and I are running a 6-week course designed to help the academically inclined expand their sense of career possibility. You can learn more here.