More than once I’ve read, somewhere on the web, someone sneering that “do what you love” is pie-in-the-sky, ridiculous, and even irresponsible advice.

Their anger is huge, the disdain palpable.

Despite the fact that I’m a huge proponent of doing what you love, I get it, the anger and the disdain both.

It hurts

See, it’s really easy to feel betrayed, especially if you’ve already staked your life on doing what you love — and it’s backfired.

There are lots of reasons we all get into academia, but one of the most prominent is that we love the things we’re reading and thinking about. We love teaching. We love the combination of people and solitude, the crazy conferences balanced with grading in a coffee shop at two in the afternoon. We love wrestling with ideas, engaging conversations across articles and panels and emails and books.

We spend a lot when we go into this game — not just tuition, but time and lost earnings and a sense of being in step with our peer group career-wise.

Sometimes it doesn’t work out, often for reasons that have nothing to do with us. And at those times, the push to do what we love can look like nothing more than a big joke. And us the gullible marks covered in key lime pie.

Why I believe in it anyway

Everything I’ve seen and everything I’ve done tells me that doing what you love is essential for long-term happiness, whether you’re doing it for pay or not. If you value happiness (and not everyone does — to each her own), then it’s pretty basic.

If you’ve ever gotten stuck in a life without the things you love — punching the clock, trying to find ways to make the time go by faster, distracting yourself with anything you can whether you’re at work or not — then you know this.

When we do what we love, we’re energized, we’re excited, we’re connected and passionate and creative and productive. And that’s not just good for us, but for everyone our lives touch.

If you’re in that place

Even so, if you’re in that place of anger and disdain and betrayal, let yourself be there. Where you are is where you are, and having lost something that precious is hard. Really hard. And you deserve the time to rail and stomp and otherwise throw yourself against what is.

Just hold open the possibility that one day, not now, but one day, it may be different. That you might find another path to your passion, that you might discover it somewhere you never expected it to be. It’s possible.

And in the meantime, know that you lost something. Know that it sucks. And know that it wasn’t you.

I’ve heard it twice in the last week, from two different people at two entirely different stages of their academic career.

I’ve already spent so much money / time on this program / career that I should just see it through.

It makes sense, right? In for a penny, in for a pound.

Except it’s a crappy way to make a decision that will affect your life so profoundly.

Problem the first

Here’s the thing. You’ve already put thousands of dollars into your graduate program. You’ve already put years into your career. You’ve already spent energy on your tenure bid.

No matter what happens next, that won’t change.

When you think those sunk costs mean you have to stick it out, however, you’re sacrificing your future in order to justify a past decision. In effect, you’re saying that unless you get the degree / get tenure / stay in this career forever, all of that money / time / energy was wasted.

And I want to, very gently, ask you if that’s really true. Did you really learn nothing, about yourself or the world or your field?

Everything you’ve chosen and experienced has brought you to this point — and you wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for where you’ve been. Just because it’s no longer the right choice doesn’t mean it never was. What is the next right thing now?

If you want to hang on because hanging on will enable you to reach a goal that really does matter to you (you have to finish if you want to be a working social worker, for instance), then that’s different. But don’t stay just because you want to redeem something that doesn’t really need to be redeemed.

Problem the second

Did you notice that “should” up there in my composite quote? I’ll let you in on a secret — anytime the word “should” comes out to play, it’s time for a little questioning.

Most of the time, we “should” ourselves because we’re fighting with ourselves, trying to make two (often unspoken) disparate beliefs play nicely together.

Maybe it’s “I really hate this” with “I don’t want to look like a failure,” so you “should” go ahead and put that tenure package together instead of hightailing it out of Dodge.

Maybe it’s “I don’t actually want to be a professor” with “I want my advisor to be proud of me,” so you “should” go on the job market.

“Should” is different from “choose,” of course. We often choose to do things we don’t enjoy in the moment to fulfill a higher goal we truly do value, and we often cover our resentment of those unenjoyable things with “should.” For example, I choose to do the laundry because I want to wear that cute green top again, but as I’m humping the baskets up and down the stairs, I’m probably saying “should.”

So when you notice that word cropping up in your self-talk or your conversations with others, check it out. Ask why. Consider the answer.

The next right thing

You know that drippy platitude about how yesterday is over and tomorrow hasn’t happened but today is the present and that’s why they call it a gift? Stupid formulation aside, the underlying truth of it applies: All you have to do is decide in and for this moment.

It’s not about justifying past decisions. It’s not about trying to control the future, whether someone’s opinion of you or what will happen. It’s just about figuring out what the next right thing is for you. Now.

So I ask you: What is the next right thing?

I get this question all the time: When did you know you needed to leave?

For some people, there was a single moment, an experience that, for whatever reason, provided a crystal-clear knowing that this path was finished. Maybe it was the fifty-seventh time they listened to a colleague complain about students. Maybe it was getting the final rejection letter in the mail. Maybe it was staying up half the night to finish grading papers while juggling a puking toddler.

But most of us don’t get a moment like that.

What I knew was that I was unhappy. Desperately, miserably unhappy. The thought of teaching these classes for the next few years — forget the rest of my career — made me want to cry. Nothing in my research was compelling. I could barely keep from rolling my eyes during committee meetings. The idea of going to conferences made me want to crawl in bed and pull the covers over my head.

My doctor put me on anti-depressants. My wife worried about me. I did the bare minimum I needed to do to get by.

The year before, my best friend had moved away to another position at another, much more prestigious, state school. I considered applying for another position, but that wasn’t appealing either. I knew enough people at enough schools in enough different positions to know that the things I was running up against weren’t about this position. They were about me and a bad fit.

That spring, I decided to apply to positions outside of academia. I’d give it two months, I thought, and if nothing had turned up, I’d teach for another year and try again. I wasn’t so far gone that I would consider leaving mid-year. Two weeks later, I had two job offers — and it was only then, when I agreed to take what was actually a pay cut when you figured in cost of living, that I realized that yes, this was the right choice for me. I was willing to sacrifice to get out.

So if you’re thinking about whether you should stay or go, know this: Don’t be hasty, but don’t hold out for certain knowledge, either. Experiment. Try on possibilities. Throw your line out into the water and see what happens. You might be surprised what you learn.

For those of you who have left, when did you know leaving was the right answer for you?

So let’s say you’ve made the decision to leave academia, and now you need to start poking around for a whole new career. Or you’ve realized you love academia, you just hate this particular university, and you need to look for other jobs to apply to. Or you love your institution, but you’d like to move into administration.

In other words, for whatever reason, you now have to gird your loins and put together … a job application package.

Here’s what happens next for most of us (and yes, I happen to resemble these remarks).

“Oh my god, I have to explain to someone else why I want this job.”

“Why do I want this job again? This is too much work. Where I am isn’t that bad.”

“Who am I to think I could get a better job?”

“No one’s going to hire me anyway — I’m both overqualified and underqualified and this is just doomed.”

“Am I really qualified for this? I’m not qualified for this. Why would someone hire me for this when they could hire X?”

And the next thing that happens is that we’re somewhere — anywhere! — other than sitting in front of that particular computer file or piece of paper.

It’s not you

Putting together a job application package, especially when you’re trying to change careers, is not just a simple, concrete, measurable task, however neat and precise the @nextsteps are in your GTD planner.

Tasks like this have enormous, weighty, complicated emotional tasks attached to them, and those emotional tasks get in the way of the practical next steps.

There’s grief attached. Fear. Confusion. The stumbles of being new and learning a new language, even enough to apply to something. And most of all, the shift of identity.

It’s really fucking hard to portray yourself as the perfect museum curator / frog handler / graphic novel editor when, inside, a little voice is saying, “but really, we’re a historian / biologist / literary scholar.”

And getting from point A (academic identity) to point B (shiny new identity) is also really difficult.

And the combination of hard — the fear, the grief, the identity work — just sits there in the way, putting lie to any attempt to tell yourself that “it’s just not that hard, dammit,” or “just do it.”

Let’s experiment

If it were your best friend in this situation, what would you do? You’d probably give him a hug, make her a cup of tea, fold yourself into the corner of the coffee shop and let him vent and rage and stomp his feet, tell her of COURSE this is hard! Look what you’re doing!

In other words, let’s try being compassionate. To you. Right now.

What do you need in order to feel centered about this shift in your life? What do you need in order to feel secure and comforted even though this is scary and hard and intimidating? What do you need to express about this whole mess so that you aren’t exploding from all of the held-in emotions? What do you need to hear in order to move through the fear and the anticipation and the uncertainty?

Get a hug from someone who loves you. Spend fifteen minutes visualizing success. Play desperately sad music and cry along. Go for a long run. Turn the music up and dance like a fool. Write a nasty letter to academia. Write a love letter to the life you’re walking towards. Make yourself a cup of tea. Hell, make yourself a chocolate cake!

But however you do it, acknowledge that this is hard. Acknowledge that telling yourself to just get a grip and do it isn’t likely to work. Acknowledge that there’s emotional stuff that needs attention, and then give it some compassionate attention.

And then notice how much easier (not easy, just easier) it is to sit down and work on that application that has the potential to jump start the next phase of your fabulous life.

(And in case you missed it, I’m doing a free teleclass on Wednesday about how to work through the issues specific to leaving academia in job applications. You can read more and sign up here.)

There are lots of reasons why people who are unhappy in academia think they can’t jump. Lots of them are emotional (“but this is what I do!” “but I’ve worked so hard for this!” “What will my advisor think?”), but some of them are decidedly practical. Or so they seem.

Two of the most common practical reasons I hear are these: anything they would want to do would require either more schooling or it would require starting at the bottom.

So let’s take a look at that first one.

I have to admit that, after years and years of education, not to mention the debt and the lost wages, more schooling is hardly appealing. (Did I ever tell you about the time, late in my graduate school career, that I filled out a credit card application that asked how many years of schooling I’d had and I had to write 23? 23?!)

But there aren’t, actually, that many careers that require a professional to completely retool with a whole new round of degrees. In fact, I can only think of a handful: accountant, medical doctor (and all the variations thereof), therapist, lawyer — basically anything that requires a license. It’s true that these cover the vast majority of “aspirational” jobs, the ones you get special pats on the head for, but as we academics well know, those aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be.

And there are more — far more — jobs that require no licensure whatsoever, and because they require no licensure are both more flexible and more interesting because more flexible.

Artist. Writer. Policy analyst. Curator. Stock market commentator. Filmmaker. Human resources expert. Event planner. Researcher. They all require expertise, but not necessarily a degree. And if you’re interested in them, chances are you’re working on that expertise as we speak.

But as exhausting as more school sounds to most of us, I’d bet hard money that, at base, the real problem with more school is that it’s about starting over — at the bottom.

So let’s talk about that career ladder.

One of the myths of careers is that there’s only one way in to anything. Now, there may well be a standard way in, but given that there are tens of millions of job holders in this country alone, do you really think they all happened in standard ways, by starting at the bottom of the proverbial ladder and working their way up?

The standard ways in are meant for people who set their sights on a particular career from the beginning and went for it. Those standard ways provide a path, a set of guideposts, to help people get from here to there, and part of what they do is train people in the kind of professionalism college can’t convey.

You know, things like showing up on time, wearing clothes that don’t smell funny and don’t have cartoons on them, using Standard Written English in professional emails and documents, finding a tone that isn’t entirely impersonal but neither is it colloquial, meeting deadlines…. The list can go on and on.

But you’re not standard, and you’re not an overeducated equivalent to some 21 year old who can’t figure out that “because my family has a ski trip!” won’t excuse her from actual responsibilities. You’ve got this fabulous degree (which testifies to all kinds of advanced skills) and all of this specialized knowledge and all of this professional experience. And that means you won’t be starting at the bottom.

When I jumped ship, for instance, I jumped into grant writing. I had little to no experience in it, but I had excellent writing and organizational skills (proven not just in my job materials but in programs I had organized and run).

I didn’t start out managing the files of potential and current grants, keeping tabs on deadlines and writing first drafts of reports to be fixed by someone else. No, that was the job of a lovely young woman fresh out of college who still needed to figure out that she had to plan for the metro to be late rather than coming up with creative excuses for her tardiness — again.

I got to start out writing grant applications and doing final drafts of reports, managing the whole process and creating systems to make all of our different deadlines run smoothly. Because let’s face it. After eleven years of running my own classrooms and writing a dissertation, I didn’t have to prove that I could work independently or manage projects.

Now, the idea of grantwriting may make you want to pluck your eyeballs out with forks, but the point is not that you should be in grantwriting. The point is that you have, by dint of earning a PhD, lots of transferrable skills that will get you in somewhere closer to the middle if you enter a new career. There will still be lots of things you need to learn — hey, it’s a new career, after all! — and you’ll likely end up working for people who are younger than you are, but it won’t be filing and making copies and doing only the dirty work. And you’ll probably advance a lot faster than the people around you as well, as all of those years of focused learning help you … learn this new career efficiently and effectively.

There are many, many reasons I’d tell you to stay in academia. (If, for instance, you adored teaching and just couldn’t stand your colleagues or your institution.) But the fear of starting at the bottom is not one of them.

In my day job, I work with a lot of people who have PhDs in things completely unrelated to their current jobs — art history, comparative literature, British history, English, biochemistry, philosophy. To a person, they love what they’re doing now, but when we go out for coffee and the topic comes up, other stuff comes up too. Anger. Frustration. Resentment. Regret.

Even though years have gone by, some part of them hasn’t let go. And it’s not uncommon. Professoring — or the hope of professoring — is more than a job. It’s an identity, a lifestyle, and it’s not easily left behind.

That’s why I’m offering a free 90-minute teleclass next week to help examine and dissolve all of the leftover emotions and stucknesses of academia. If you’ve left, if you’re working on leaving, if you’re unhappy, sign up here for the call. If you want to listen but can’t be on the call itself, sign up anyway. I’ll email out a recording afterwards.

Last night I was on the phone with a friend who’s trying to decide whether she should stay in her relationship. “What do you think I should do?” she asked me.

And I had to admit that I had no idea. Because I’m not her, and I’m not God. And even if I were her or God, I still might not know. Because the answer might not be clear yet.

Go back to bed, Liz

There’s a scene in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love that I return to in moments like this. In this scene, she’s sobbing on the bathroom floor, paralyzed in her own struggle to figure out what to do about her marriage and her happiness. Should she leave her husband? Should she stay? And as she’s sobbing on the floor, she hears the voice of God (her description), and that voice says, “Go back to bed, Liz.”

It was so immediately clear that this was the only thing to do. I would not have accepted any other answer. I would not have accepted a great booming voice that said either: You Must Divorce Your Husband! or You Must Not Divorce Your Husband! Because that’s not true wisdom. True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer. Go back to bed, said this omniscient interior voice, because you don’t need to know the final answer right now, at three o’clock in the morning on a Thursday in November. . . . Go back to bed, because the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer.

What does this have to do with the topic at hand?

I have conversations just like this (“What should I do?“) with people struggling with academia, because it’s much the same — a huge, overwhelming, complicated question that calls into question both identity and your everyday everything. Where will you be, who will be around you, what will your daily routine look like, who will you be? It depends. On the answer.

And oh, people want that answer more than anything. They want to know. And of course they do. We do. Because not knowing is really painful.

But it’s entirely possible — likely even — that the answer isn’t here yet.

Maybe some part of you is still hoping against hope that something will be different — that perfect job will come through, or your institution will suddenly recognize that you’re a total research rockstar (because you ARE) instead of patting you on the head and deciding you’re really a teacher, or you’ll find your teaching groove.

Maybe some part of you is convinced that it’s not that bad, or that there’s nothing better out there, or that no one will care if you try to make changes where you are.

Or maybe your choices are equally shiny and equally terrifying.

For whatever reason, the answer may not be coming out to play right now.

And that’s okay

Yes, it’s uncomfortable. Yes, it’s terrifying (“What if I never figure this out and I’m stuck here forever?!).

And it’s still okay.

It won’t be forever, I promise. It can’t be forever, because things are always changing, and whatever is getting in the way of the answer will somehow be changed. We just don’t know how, yet.

But I can tell you this: When the answer comes, when it finally shows up, you will know it by the peace it brings you, even if there’s also grief or frustration or anger or sadness. When the real answer (not our attempts to force an answer) comes, something in you will know it in a deep way that can’t be budged.

If you’re not feeling that sense of peace right now, if you’re at the sobbing-on-the-bathroom-floor stage, I beg you: Go back to bed.

The answer will come, and when it does, there will be plenty of hard work to do, and the best thing you can do right now is to treat yourself with as much kindness and compassion and curiosity as you can while the answer emerges.

So get sleep, and eat well, and let go of any to-do list items that aren’t actually absolutely necessary right now, and spend some time doing something that feeds you, whether it’s hanging out with your kid or going dancing or reading trashy magazines in front of cheesy movies. And know that I’m thinking about you.

It’s probably no surprise, but you could track my progress as an ex-academic by my book collection.

When I left academia “for good,” I trailed behind me in that monster truck dozens of boxes of academic books. I hadn’t had time to winnow through them in the few weeks between getting a job offer and getting the hell out of Dodge, so I just packed them up and resolved to sort through them when we got settled.

It took me three years to open those boxes again. And in the meantime, they sat against the walls of my dining room (not even the basement!) as a visible reminder of all of the time, effort, and money I turned my back on when I turned my back on that career. As you might imagine, I don’t recommend this.

Eventually, though, my desire for a pretty (and useable!) dining room outweighed my resistance to opening up those Pandora’s boxes, and I sat down one rainy Saturday determined to end with Order. At the end of that day, I had a short shelf of books neatly leaning against each other and bag after bag after bag of books to donate to the AAUW booksale.

I had to confront the fact that I hadn’t left academia very far behind. I’d simply stacked it around my dining room. And the thought that kept going through my mind as I opened all of those boxes and scanned all of those spines was this: This isn’t me. Those composition books? Not me. Professional writing books? Not me. Modernist literature? Definitely not me.

It was incredibly freeing. None of those, really, had ever been me, and letting them go — letting go of the me that had them in her collection — meant there was room for the me who loved psychology and personality and Eastern philosophy and non-fiction about crazy things like how paint colors were discovered and developed (dead bugs for red, in fact).

It meant I could love A History of the Modern Fact and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women for themselves, because I enjoyed reading them and because I liked the part of me who liked reading them. It meant I could reclaim my intellectual curiosity instead of my intellectual pose — and the curiosity was much more fun.

And so I purged the collection of all of those disciplines, all of those scholars, who no longer compelled me. It felt like freedom, like I was finally washing my hands of the struggle, of those years when I couldn’t rub the misfitting edges of myself off fast enough.

But that wasn’t the end of it. A few years later, we started winnowing through things again, this time to pare down, have more space, and get rid of anything we didn’t either love or use. And I found myself getting rid of fiction.

Now, your experience in graduate school may well have been different, but I ran with a self-consciously pomo crowd, people who only liked music if no one had heard of it, people who read Jonathan Lethem before watching Space Ghost Coast to Coast. I didn’t really fit in.

It’s not that I didn’t like those things — I did. But I liked them with my head, not with my gut. Left to my own devices, I liked predictable melodies and romantic comedies and novels about people.

As I came across them all again, I realized that I’m unlikely to read those books or watch those movies again. I’m no longer satisfied by things that feed only my mind — I want things that feed my soul. Me, I’d rather read about the experiences of spiritual mystics or good management theory or how to hack SEO or someone’s personal account of mental illness. And so they, too, got packed into bags and boxes and summarily evicted from my shelves.

What I learned from my book collection was this: leaving academia is a process. Because it’s so much a part of our identities, because so many of us experienced graduate school in the impressionable decade of our twenties, because it took so damn long, turning in your office key isn’t the end of it. There will be layers and layers of untying identities, of examining assumptions, of watching yourself bloom. And that’s okay. It’s better than okay, in fact — it’s magical.

So if you’ve got boxes of books stacked around your own dining room — literally or metaphorically — know that it’s okay. Know that you’re on your way, that you’re right where you’re supposed to be, that it will be different one day. You’ll reclaim your dining room and your bookshelf both.

But in the meantime, be right where you are, whether it’s grief or anger or confusion or avoidance. It’s all part of the journey. And it’s all good.