I know I’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating, because our culture does a crap job of helping us understand and live through transition.

When I talk about transition, I mean any change that affects our sense of who we are. Becoming an assistant professor after years of being a graduate student is a transition. Becoming a parent is a transition. Leaving a relationship is a transition. Even moving is a transition. But leaving a career that defines itself as more than just a job? Definitely a transition.

There are three basic stages to transition. I’m going to list them linearly, but they often overlap and repeat and show up all higgledy-piggledy.

Stage 1: Grief

Even when the transition is something you want, grief is always part of the picture, because loss is always part of the picture. Becoming an assistant professor means losing the structure of someone else being in charge, the lovely linear pathway that’s all defined for you. Becoming a parent might mean losing those days when you could do nothing but sleep and watch Netflix. This kind of grief can be hard to recognize and admit to, because you can feel churlish or ungrateful feeling grief around something you want. We have a cultural story that grief only shows up around things you don’t want, so you might question whether or not you really want this thing. But good change and grief can coexist.

When the transition is one you’d rather not have, well, the grief can flatten you. All the manifestations of grief we’re familiar with from the Kubler-Ross model come out to play: denial (no, I can’t leave!), bargaining (maybe if I do X, THEN Y will happen), anger (goddamit, I did everything right!), sadness (but I loved it so), etc.

Stage 2: Destabilization

I’ve heard this stage called the dark night of the soul, and that’s pretty accurate. You’re no longer who you were, and you aren’t yet who you will be, so your sense of self, of who you are, is splintered. There are people who really love this stage, because they love the sense of endless possibility, but for most of us it’s just bewildering and overwhelming and kind of terrifying.

It boils down to one big existential “what the hell am I supposed to do next?”

Stage 3: Coalescing

In this stage, the new version of things is starting to become familiar. You’re starting to feel like maybe you’ll be competent at this. You’re starting to think things will be okay. There’s still a lot you don’t yet know or understand, but the ground is a little more firm under your feet and you basically know which direction to head.

All of this exhausts your brain

In the past few years, there’s been a lot of research on what’s called decision fatigue. Our brains have a finite capacity for decision-making (which includes the application of willpower). When we’ve used up our capacity, our ability to self-regulate, to make considered decisions, and to stick to choices in the face of temptations goes straight into the toilet.

During normal non-transition life, a lot of decisions are pre-made. Problems are pre-solved. You know how to get to the post office. You know where your pants are and which ones are appropriate for this workplace. You know who to ask about that project. You know what the weather will likely do. Habits can get a bad rap, but routine helps us preserve our decision-making powers for other things.

During transition, few decisions are pre-made and few problems are pre-solved. Where’s the post office? Who knows? What are the dinner options? Got me. What’s the right thing to wear to work? Who can help you get that data?

All of this means that your decision-making, problem-solving capacity gets used up really quickly. When you run out, you’re likely to be more emotional, more prone to either freezing or making rash decisions, and more likely to be clumsy.

This is why transition, even transition that seems small in the scheme of your life, can kick your ass. A friend of mine recently started a new job, and even though everything else in her life is the same, she’s coming home from work ready to go to bed without dinner. She’s just that worn out.

When the transition is bigger, or when transitions are piled on top of one another (as happens when we combine moving with new jobs or new careers), well, the flattening can be epic.

Self-care is the only thing that can blunt the edges of the flattening, but nothing can actually make it not exhausting. Unfortunately, the only way to get to not exhausted is to keep going until things become familiar.

So if you’re leaving or even thinking about leaving, know that it’s not only okay, but completely normal to feel grief, to feel unmoored and panicky, and to feel completely worn out by all of it. This, too, shall eventually pass.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, my wife has spent the last few years going through seminary, internship, and all of the accompanying institutional work. From my outsider’s perspective, it’s been remarkably like academia, right down to the vocation, low pay, institutional hurdles, and the mythology.

In the end, she decided that congregational ministry wasn’t for her, and for a while she turned her attention to applying for jobs.

Despite all the conversations we’ve had over the years, she became temporarily convinced that because she wasn’t going to get a job doing what she had trained for (ministry), she was limited to jobs in the fields she’d had before she went back to school: fundraising or telemarketing. The problem was, she didn’t want to go back into fundraising or telemarketing, having left them both for good reasons. Cue the spiral of panic: if she wasn’t going to be a minister, and she didn’t want to do fundraising or telemarketing, she was never going to get a job.

Now, I’ve spent too long talking to people switching careers to believe any of this, but it makes complete sense that it was part of her process

Transition is hard. Transition is destabilizing. Transition is exhausting, which makes things like figuring out the next steps of your life even more challenging. Leaving a career path you trained for, that was part of your identity, is most certainly a transition.

When you’re in the middle of a transition, it can be a challenge not to walk into walls. (No really — coordination goes to shit.) In that context, is it any wonder that trying to think beyond the categories of familiar career paths doesn’t happen naturally?

We eventually had a conversation, my wife and I, in which I told her about all the different jobs my friends do, and reminded her of all the various jobs I’ve done over the years. None of them were the kinds of jobs that emerge linearly from degrees, and none of them were the kinds of jobs it’s easy to know about from the outside. But once we started talking about them, she realized that she could totally do that one! And that one! Okay, not that one, her ability to manage paper is negligible, but the one over there, that involved corralling people? Right up her alley.

This is why I tend to say four things over and over again when I’m working with people who are leaving academia.

1. You have more skills than you think.
2. The best way to find out what jobs actually exist in the world is to ask people what they do and what they like about it.
3. Of course you’re exhausted and grieving, and that is as it should be.
4. Step one is always abundant, luxurious self-care, as much as you can possibly stand.

You’re going to be okay. You’re going to figure it out. And it makes total sense if, along the way, you have a few meltdowns of the “I’m doomed” variety. Not because you are doomed, but because that just seems to be part of the process.