Our culture does a piss-poor job of dealing with grief and mourning. A friend of mine who lost a late-stage pregnancy reports that people actually turned around and ran away from her in the halls in the weeks afterwards. No joke.
If we’re that bad at dealing with actual death, just think for a minute about how bad we are at loss that is less tangible.
You will grieve
Even if you got to the stage of things where you were so disgusted by everything that you were glad to close the book on that chapter of your life, you will grieve. If you got a tenure-track job and decided you didn’t like, it you will grieve. If you didn’t get a job when you really wanted one, you will grieve.
No matter how you get to the point of leaving, you will grieve. Even if you want to go.
Because leaving isn’t just leaving. Leaving means letting go of the whole future narrative of your life that you’d been aiming at. It means facing a future you don’t know the contours of. It means giving up the dreams you had about what this career path would be for you.
Even if you had no emotional hangups about it at all (okay, probably not possible), you would still grieve. Sadness and grieving do the work of letting go. They’re HOW we let go.
It takes time
I’m sorry to tell you this, but grief is a process. Forget that whole Kubler-Ross thing (it’s accurate for sudden and shocking change; not so much for grief) — grief is more like sitting on the shore, letting the waves lap around you. Sometimes, at high tide, they submerge you entirely. Other times, at low tide, they’re just licking at your toes. But they go away, they come back, and while there’s a general rhythm, you can’t exactly predict it.
It takes time. You’ve probably spent a decade in academia. That entire time, you had a vision of who you would be, the career you would have, the life you would live. When you leave, you lose all of that.
I’ve talked to so many clients who think they should be over it already, when “already” can be measured in weeks or months.
Oh sweetie. You should not be over it already
This is big, and profound, and significant. It will take longer than a headcold to get over. It will almost certainly take longer than you’d like it to.
But if you can really feel the sadness and the grief — the bodily sensations, the crying, not the narrative about it — the worst of it will pass relatively quickly.
Weirdly, you’ll actually get over it much more quickly by explicitly giving yourself time and space to grieve. It can feel like it will pull you under and never let you go, that if you start actually grieving you’ll never stop.
But you will stop. The grief will run its course. And it will take so much less of you with it if you can open to it.
So go ahead. Grieve. You deserve to acknowledge what you’ve lost. It matters that you lost it.
It sucks, and I’m so sorry.
I bet, you looked into my head and wrote this just for me. 😉 Thank you for so much permission. It’s been about a year since I’ve given up on being an academic. So much grief still.
Paula´s last blog post ..The Art of Noticing
My grief took years. Partly that’s because I spent a whole bunch of time avoiding it, but it still took a long time. And you know what? That’s okay too. It takes just as long as it takes.
The thing I’m already grieving is just the ‘title’ of professor. I was a professor (never tenure track) for 9 years and I liked the reaction and respect I got from those outside of academia. I cared very little about what people thought of me WITHIN the tower (other than my students) and a whole lot about the prestige it afforded me.
I think it will take years to get over that.
I got a job right after the Ph.D. and I was elated, after almost 20 years of adjuncting and working my way up through a dynamite, creative project and dissertation. It didn’t matter so much that I was a “Lecturer” when colleagues who had started work there four years earlier who were also Fixed Term had the designation of Associate Professor” because of their earned doctorates. Three semesters pass, an academic year and a half later, I was “withdrawn from the classroom as a detriment to the Department.” I had all new preps, new program, and it wasn’t just the pouty evaluations. I had no mentoring or understanding of chain of command & I tried to solve some problems myself & the division head took it as flouting her authority. I haven’t been fired for 23 years until now. Welcome to a toxic division? The norm?
Wow, it felt like you were telling me to stop holding my wall up and let it crumble. I needed to be told because all my life I held my world up around me never taking time to acknowledge the things normal people grieve for and instead going forward full speed.
Still in this process, myself. I’m not even sure how to grieve at this point, or what to even say about it.
The only thing I can do is keep telling myself that I could not have known. Nothing in my life prepared me for the environment I had to deal with, and there’s nothing I could have done to prepare myself for it.
It’s cold comfort, considering the stakes.
I wish I knew how long I was going to grieve, or how to get out of the pit. I keep applying to jobs, but the university has ensured that I won’t be able to find a job without hiring a lawyer to make them release my transcripts (they won’t, at this point, and I’m too poor to get legal representation to get the transcripts out of the university.)
And years of sexual harassment, as well as a long train of lost paperwork, verbal harassment and other forms of on the job harassment have made a shell out of me.
I need to figure out how to keep moving despite all this, but I just don’t know how. I’m going through the motions, but I feel so damn empty. I’m seeing someone for the depression, but that isn’t really helping, either.
I wish I knew what else to do, or how to retarget myself. After this many years in academia, I feel cut adrift.
tired now, I’m so sorry. That’s a truckload of badness you should never have had to deal with.