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.

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.