Escape the Ivory Tower

Leaving academia behind

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.

The problem of careers

There’s this myth we have about the importance of careers. We have this idea that our working life is supposed to be coherent and progressive, that it should continually rise towards a pinnacle (full professorship, an X- or C-level corporate job, directorship of a non-profit) that indicates that We Have Made It, that We Are Good And Worthy People. A career indicates expertise and gravitas, “settling down” and “growing up,” all at the same time.

In short, we should have one. But only one.

Now, I’ve got nothing but respect for people who’ve known since they were small what they want to do and who have experienced fulfillment and joy and all of that from that very same career. Power to them! But that’s not what happened in my life. And it’s not what happened in the lives of many people I know.

Many of us fell into careers instead of choosing them. I, for example, went to graduate school because I loved learning, not because I had the faintest idea what being a professor actually entailed. A dear friend of mine got an entry-level job after college in a mailroom to pay the rent and later became VP of that same organization, without necessarily ever having an ambition for international development. An acquaintance got a part-time job telemarketing in college and now runs a division of that company.

But once you have a career, however it came about, it’s not just a job — it’s part of who you are. After all, “what do you do?” is one of the first things we ask new adult aquaintances, and we often conflate the answer with the person. We say, “She’s a lawyer,” or “He runs a non-profit,” instead of “She’s a rock-climber” or “He’s an amazing wildlife photographer.”

In my experience it’s even worse in places like academia, where there’s the combination of a long training period and an explicit working identity at the end of it. When everyone around you is an academic — when your friends, picked up through the slog of graduate school, are academics; when your social life in College Town is all other academics — and when you have put in years of explaining to family just what it means to be an academic (no, we don’t get summers off!), well, it can be really, really hard to realize that this career you have, this identity you’ve taken on, does not make you happy.

And because it’s not just a job, but a career, an identity, it’s easy to move from “I’m unhappy” to “WTF is wrong with me?”

The answer is: nothing. If the career you’re in right now is making you unhappy, nothing is wrong with you. This just isn’t the career for you.

But the myth of The One Career helps keep us stuck exactly where we are, because the very idea of “becoming an accountant” or “becoming a professional photographer” or “becoming a radio talk-show host” all seem so very daunting, so very large. “It’s years of training!” “Do you know how long it would take to get to this level in that career?” And so we suck it up and continue being miserable in this career we have, because examining and changing our identity around work is hard, scary, and frankly, not modeled very many places.

If you’re in that position, if you’re miserable in the career you’re in, instead of thinking in terms of a career, try thinking in terms of the kind of tasks and work environment that make you deeply happy — “doing” instead of “becoming.” Do you love working with people? Do you like involving your whole body in your work? Do you need to be outside? Do you enjoy regular hours, or do you want to work at 11pm? Do you want a mission-based job, or do you like to go home and put work away?

The bottom line is this: You don’t need a career. Think about that. You don’t need a career, which is, after all, an external story about success that has nothing to do with you and your experience. You need a job you enjoy and that pays the bills so you can be your whole self. That’s all.

And then, when people ask you “what do you do?” you can tell them you’re a rock-climbing, book-reading, trivia-loving movie buff — and mean it.

On the virtues of quitting

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.

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