Seriously, though, if you’re still in academia, it’s probably been about a month since you finished teaching, turned in your grades, walked out of your last committee meeting, and hung up your robes from working commencement. Even if you’re teaching this summer, [...]]]> It’s the middle of June. Do you know where your energy is?

Seriously, though, if you’re still in academia, it’s probably been about a month since you finished teaching, turned in your grades, walked out of your last committee meeting, and hung up your robes from working commencement. Even if you’re teaching this summer, it’s been about a month since the packed schedules, the endless students needing your attention, the rushing around, the inbox full of items that need to be attended to now now now.

How do you feel?

This is a good time to check in with yourself, because being outside of the time pressures of the typical semester can give you a much better sense of how you feel about things.

Take your research, for instance. Are you excited by it? Bored by it? Avoiding it? Are you getting things done, noodling around without making much progress, or putting it off because hey, the World Cup only happens once every four years?

When you think about academia right now, how do you feel? Affection? Anger? Indifference? Excitement? Energy?

If you take the time to check in with yourself now, when you’ve had some time to decompress, you’ll get some really important clues — clues about what actually motivates and energizes you, clues about what drains you, clues about what you enjoy and what you merely tolerate. Figuring those things out will get you one step closer to figuring out how to adjust your life to maximize your own happiness.

So tell me: How are you feeling about it all right now? Is it different than it was during the semester? How?

But some of us need things to happen in [...]]]> Some of us are the kind of people who can think our way into change — we can imagine alternative lives, we can believe that we’re qualified for this other career, we can create step-by-step plans to get us from here to our dreamed-of future.

But some of us need things to happen in the real world for us to be able to figure anything out.

What about this?

If you’re the type of person that needs to interact with the great wide world to figure things out, relying on brainstorming and research isn’t going to cut it.

In that case, try experimenting.

In other words, if you’re interested in doing something other than academia and you aren’t sure if it would work, apply and see what happens. At the very least you’ll get experience applying and you’ll be able to observe your own reactions to the possibility. At most you might get real feedback on your skills or even, gasp, get a job offer. Right there you’ll learn things about yourself and what you want to do next.

Nothing is all or nothing

The thing that usually holds us back from experimenting is the fear that if we apply, we have to take it. Or if we take a short course in something to find out more, we’re obligated to take the next one. Or if we contemplate doing something else, we’re turning our back on academia entirely, forever and ever.

But it’s not true. You may wade into the waters of the post-academic world and decide you like things the way they are. You might learn something that you can bring back to where you are and change it for the better. You might simply answer the “what if” question that was at the heart of your restlessness. Who knows?

The cool thing about experimentation is that its goal is simply to learn. At every stage, at every different fork, you can ask yourself what you want, what feels better, and what you want to know next. And that means that it’s always successful — because you can’t experiment and not learn things, even if the thing you learn is that project X is not for you.

So, what kind of an experiment would answer some of the nagging questions you’re facing? What would you need in order to try those experiments? Inquiring minds want to know.

When we’re stressing out about our place in academia, whether it’s the identity-based stressed of “what do I want” or the logistical stress of “how do I get a job I want / [...]]]> How does your job fit into your life? More importantly, how do you want your job to fit into your life?

When we’re stressing out about our place in academia, whether it’s the identity-based stressed of “what do I want” or the logistical stress of “how do I get a job I want / how do I make this job work,” it’s really really easy to let everything else slide until that’s the only thing we’re thinking about, talking about, or engaging.

And then the trouble really starts.

All the other pieces

Lots of things go into a healthy, whole life — primary relationships, family, friends, hobbies, spirituality, community. If you sat down and listed out all the things that are important to you, I’m sure your career would come up, but I’m equally sure it would be one thing among others.

When one part of our lives is feeling off the rails, it’s tempting to believe that if we could only figure that one out, if we could only get it right, then we’d be happy. Then we’d be satisfied. Then we’d be comfortable and pleasant and fulfilled.

Honestly, the mono-focus of academia only exacerbates this tendency. How many academics do you know who have few interests outside their jobs, few friends outside their colleagues, few activities that don’t involve campus?

But however distressing any one part of our lives is, it’s the whole that matters. And while our careers and jobs are incredibly important to our whole lives, so are many other things.

Put it in context

You are more than an academic. Really.

Go ahead — write down all of the other roles you’re actively fulfilling these days: parent, partner, rock climber, flautist, beer snob, gardener, yogi, fountain-pen enthusiast, chicken farmer, writing group participant, marathoner, family member, volunteer, mentor.

What have you done for them lately?

Blend, baby, blend

The ruling metaphor of the late 20th-century life was “balance” — all those images of fitting it all in at once, having it all, finding that point at which everything fit.

You know what? There’s too much room for failure and too little room for success in that metaphor. Get caught up in a project, and whoops! There goes the balance. Have a life crisis? Whoops! There goes the balance.

“Blend,” on the other hand, allows for more than two things at once. “Blend” suggests that you’re cooking up something fantastic. “Blend” is about more than a single point in time, so you’re not looking at this moment, you’re looking at the composition of a week, a month, a season, a year.

Keeping struggles within the big picture

I bring all of this up because when I talk to clients, I see how easy it is for them to slip into an obsessive focus on whatever piece they’re trying to figure out right now. Everything is about the job search, everything is about figuring out whether they want to stay in academia, everything is about dissecting this job that’s driving them batty.

That means they never rest. That means they aren’t being able to lean into any other part of their life that is working and gain strength and confidence from it. That means they’re focused only on the thing that isn’t working, that’s hard and challenging.

That means they’re fucking exhausted.

I don’t know about you, but I make really crappy decisions when I’m exhausted. When I’m exhausted, I make decisions just so I can be done and I can stop making a decision already, because I’m too burnt out to be able to continue. That’s not exactly the way to a well-chosen life.

So if you’re in that space, make a conscious effort to bring back into your lived experience all those other things that are important. Go hike in the mountains. Go stare at pretty paintings in the museum. Go dancing. Go to coffee with your best friend and critique all the outfits that come in the door. Go read something entirely mindless and unenlightened. Go wrestle the dog. Go on a date with your partner. Go color with your kid. Go catch up on all of the blog posts and forum posts for that beloved hobby you’ve been neglecting.

In short, take a break. Blend the rest of your life back in. You’ll come back energized and more clear-headed and more creative and more optimistic.

Really.

Sometimes, the whole enterprise seems, well, self-indulgent and stupid. My mother’s father, for example, wouldn’t have recognized the question. He fought in WWII and sent money home to his family, he worked in the quarry, he volunteered [...]]]> We have a lot of baggage around the idea of a calling, we people of this century.

Sometimes, the whole enterprise seems, well, self-indulgent and stupid. My mother’s father, for example, wouldn’t have recognized the question. He fought in WWII and sent money home to his family, he worked in the quarry, he volunteered at the fire department and the police station and the water station, he raised three girls with a wife he loved, and when they retired, he dragged my grandmother all over the country on special elder-tours. By all accounts he was satisfied with, even pleased with, his life, without ever engaging the idea that he needed to live out a special mission.

Sometimes people take it too far. I’ve watched more than one college near-graduate refuse to take a job on the grounds that it wasn’t inherently fulfilling to them, blithely neglecting to remember that the only way that works is if someone else, who isn’t necessarily thrilled with every moment of their job, either, subsidizes the project. (I suspect this is rarer now than it once was, the economy being what it is.)

And sometimes it sounds just a bit too religious for our intellectual, post-humanist selves.

Most of us, however, end up somewhere in the middle — longing for a sense of meaning, connection, and purpose while simultaneously not being convinced that anything we’re running up against is It.

It’s like we believe that what we need to do is just find our (avocational) soulmate, and then everything will be fine, everything will unfold after that, but this avocation has a bad sense of humor, and that one is too uptight about money.

This is why leaving academia can feel like divorce, right down to the question of who keeps which friends. We found our One True Love, but what happens when the shine is off that particular rose? Does that mean we’ve failed? Does that mean we’re doomed to marginal happiness ever after?

Just like there’s probably not one person in the whole world who will automatically make you happy forever, there’s no one calling that will make you happy forever. Rather, there’s no simple conception of your calling that will make you happy forever.

Your calling, just like your marriage, your relationships, your life, and you yourself, is always growing and evolving. You’re always learning more about it. New possibilities are always opening up. And that means that what was right five years ago isn’t necessarily right now, and what’s right now isn’t necessarily what will be right five or ten or twenty years down the road.

Because so many of us experienced our fields and our work as a calling, it can be brutally troubling to run up against dissatisfaction. Because we felt called to academia, realizing that call is no longer there is painful.

I don’t want to suggest that those losses shouldn’t be mourned if you’re experiencing grief. I do want to suggest that you open up your conception of yourself to see what you’re being called to now.

Parker Palmer talks about your calling as the place where your deepest desires meet the needs of the world. In other words, while there are any number of things you’re probably good at, and while there are infinite problems in the world to solve, the particular configuration of your heart and this moment illuminate what you’re being called to now.

What are you being called to now? How well does that calling work within the structures of academia?

How do you know if it’s the right decision? There’s one key way: [...]]]> Let’s say you’ve made a decision — to stay or to go, it doesn’t much matter. You’ve done your pro / con lists, you’ve queried your friends and family, you’ve taken a real look at your options, and here you are.

How do you know if it’s the right decision? There’s one key way: peace.

If this is the right decision, even if it brings with it sorrow or grief or anxiety, it will also bring with it a deep and abiding sense of peace, of rightness, of settledness.

Just to give you an example that for once has nothing to do with academia, once upon a time I was in a spiritual community that had fed me for a long time. Most all of my friends were either part of this community or friendly towards it. My wife was heavily involved. More and more, though, I was getting the feeling something was off.

I thought about it, I ignored it, I cried a lot, I stomped my feet, I worried, and eventually, I decided to leave. And when I made that decision, I got a deep, peaceful certainty in my belly.

It wasn’t fun. The next few months had a lot of tears and not a few fights with my darling wife as we navigated this new reality. I’m less close to some of those friends than I was then. There are things about it that I still miss. But that sense of peace never wavered, even on the days when I wished more than anything that things could be different than they were.

I had a similar experience when I was leaving academia. When I had to face telling my colleagues I was leaving, oh, I wanted more than anything else to Not Have to Do This Scary, Scary Thing. But I was also convinced it was the right thing to do.

See, when your insides match the world’s outsides, when you’re in alignment with where your life is going next, there’s something right about it.

And I’m not trying to suggest there’s fate or anything else at work — but I am trying to suggest that we know things subconsciously, unconsciously, that we try to deny for a long time. And when that knowing gets brought into the light and acted upon, well, it resolves a lot of tension. And that resolution brings peace.

If you aren’t getting peace, consider the possibility that the answer hasn’t yet appeared. But if you do experience peace, rest assured that following it will lead you to the next great adventure.

And [...]]]> When you’re unhappy in academia, it can be hard to tell what your misery means. Is it a sign that this career isn’t for you? Is it a sign you need to shift something within your institution or discipline or career? Is it a sign you need to take better care of yourself?

And just to make things more complicated, it could mean more than one of these things. Maybe you  need more self-care AND you need to get off that one committee that makes you dread going to the office. Charming, no?

So how can you tell if you need to hit the road or “just” make some changes? Here are a few ways to tell the difference.

Think back to your last break, whether it was summer or a real vacation or a sabbatical or any time that didn’t have regular commitments of time outside of yourself. After you had a bit of time to decompress, what did it feel like to think about doing work? Were you dreading it? Avoiding it? Excited about it? If you dreaded it even after you got some sleep, then something about this job is not right. If you got excited, then for heaven’s sake, work on better self-care!

Think about each component of your job separately: Your research, your undergraduate teaching, your graduate teaching, your advising work, your administrative work, each and every committee you’re on. As you contemplate each one, really tune in to how you feel physically and emotionally. What patterns do you see? What do those patterns suggest?

If you adore teaching and research, maybe you need to rethink your service work. If you like teaching but hate research right now, does it feel any different to contemplate a different project? Do different kinds of teaching feel different? (I, personally, hated teaching graduate seminars, despite the fact that they were what we were all “supposed” to want to teach.) Maybe a different mix of teaching would work better for you, or a different institution with different students. If you hate teaching altogether, however, academia might not be the right place for you.

Imagine your perfect day: Where do you wake up, what is the environment like, what do you do next? Dream your way through a whole, perfect, everyday-day, and see what comes up. Does anything about it look like your current life? If so, what are the parts you want to keep and what do you want to get rid of? If not, what do you want instead?

Inventory your extracurriculars. What do you do when you’re not working? Do you spend time with a partner, with kids, with friends? Do you have hobbies? Are there things you want to be doing but “can’t” because your work has taken over your life? Academia, like many things, expands to fill the time available to it, and that wonderful time flexibility means there aren’t any external structures to help you keep it within reasonable bounds. If you’re miserable and your job is taking over your life, try setting aside real time for non-job-related fun and see if you feel better. It’s easy to resent even the perfect job if it isn’t leaving room for other things you love.

Get rid of the shoulds. If you take a break from telling yourself what you “should” do, what do you WANT to do? Does anything on your to-do list sound fun? We spend so much time learning by watching in this career that it can be hard to notice what we need to make this work for us. Maybe your colleague can grade four papers a day and get them all done efficiently, while you really just need to set aside five hours in front of Glee reruns. If that’s your way, having “grade 4 papers” on your to-do list every bleeping day will likely make you want to stab your eyes out. And that will affect everything else.

You “should” serve on committees, you “should” contribute, you “should” teach a certain way, you “should” write a certain kind of essay — what happens if you drop the stories?

At the end of the day, there’s no one thing that will tell you whether you should stay or go or how to fix what’s wrong. But by accumulating evidence, paying attention to yourself, and refraining from “should”ing  yourself into someone else’s life, you’ll get some clues — and maybe even a whole path.

You might know him as one of the brothers who does Click & Clack, the classic car fix-it talk show on NPR. But have you ever read his bio?

This guy has quit careers in industry, in executive training, and in academia — all because, at the [...]]]> Tom Magliozzi is one of my heros.

You might know him as one of the brothers who does Click & Clack, the classic car fix-it talk show on NPR. But have you ever read his bio?

This guy has quit careers in industry, in executive training, and in academia — all because, at the end of the day, he didn’t enjoy it. He wanted to avoid what he called the big W — anything that felt like work — and he did. Repeatedly.

I can only imagine the horror stories the people around him trotted out to convince him that all of this quitting was a bad idea — you’ll never work again, you’ll be homeless, you’ll never amount to anything, don’t you want to DO something with your life?

But, at least in his retelling, he blithely went ahead with all of the quitting because his lived experience mattered to him. And it’s clear that honoring his actual lived experience — not the social story about that experience, but how he actually felt about it — has not only led him to a life he enjoys, he’s gotten to have fun all along the way trying things out.

Too few of us follow his example — what with the naysayers in our heads and out of them.

Yes, it’s hard to imagine quitting a career we’ve put time into even though we don’t enjoy it, because we imagine just doing the same damn thing again — years of struggle and hard work to get to the point of not enjoying it. But what people like Tom Magliozzi show us is that it isn’t always like that, and quitting the thing we don’t like makes room for the thing we do like. Better yet, it makes room for the thing we love.

So think about your lived experience — is there a part of it, maybe to do with academia or maybe not, that you experience as boring, deadening, eternally frustrating, exhausting? Consider quitting.

Maybe it won’t happen today, or even tomorrow, but if you’re unhappy, consider quitting. And imagine what could grow in its place.

The other people I knew who’d left had what seemed to me to be better, nearly inarguable reasons for walking away from the career that everyone around me lauded as [...]]]> When I was considering leaving academia, I kept getting hung up on one thing: was my perpetual dissatisfaction a good enough reason to go?

The other people I knew who’d left had what seemed to me to be better, nearly inarguable reasons for walking away from the career that everyone around me lauded as the only authentic, vibrant option. One never landed an interview, much less a tenure-track job, and could no longer justify cobbling together teaching and a hotel front-desk job. Another was limited to a small geographic orbit that prevented the kind of national job search that is most people’s only hope these days. Others were politicized by — and ostracized because of — grad student unionization drives.

I didn’t see many examples of people leaving after they landed a tenure-track job, that holy of holies, unless they went up for tenure and didn’t make it, and when that happened, the usual response was a polite clucking about their having known the expectations for six — count ‘em, six! — years. (Nevermind the slow demise of academic publishing and gendered service expectations.)

Oh, I heard tell of people who walked away from academia for political reasons (the increased reliance on adjuncts instead of full-time faculty, for example) even after they received tenure, but that wasn’t what I saw happening around me. No, if people left, it was because they were forced out or never let in to begin with.

Frankly, I was lucky and I knew it. Oh, I worked hard — class work and comps and proposal and dissertation and defense and MLA interviews and campus interviews — but I knew plenty of people who worked just as hard and didn’t manage to catch the breaks I did in the job search.

I was lucky, profoundly lucky, and turning my back on that luck seemed, well, churlish.

But despite all of that, I didn’t feel lucky. I felt dispirited, enervated, depressed, and annoyed — and all of that meant I wasn’t getting a thing done. I tried pep talks, exercise, anti-depressants, regimented organizational systems, pretty calendars (office supplies nearly always help!), writing groups, and whining. Nothing worked. I fidgeted time away and continued to feel miserable.

Finally, after seriously trying the patience of my lovely wife, I decided that despite a decade of my life and tens of thousands of dollars, I deserved to be happy in my life. Not only that, the job deserved to have someone happy to perform it. I owed it to myself, I owed it to the profession, and I owed it to the other poor job-seekers out there.

Here’s my bottom line: You deserve to be happy. In fact, you owe it to yourself and to everyone who loves you to be happy. If you are unhappy, then you have an obligation to do the work to figure out how to become happy.

Maybe that means jumping ship. Maybe that means finding a different position that fits you better. Maybe that means giving up some commitments or taking on others. Maybe it means taking some risks. Maybe it means setting some boundaries. Maybe it means making the space and taking the time to indulge hobbies you love.

Only you know what will make you happy. But if you are unhappy, that alone is a good enough reason to make change happen in your life, whatever that change needs to look like.