I’ve been talking about the four things I say over and over again to people 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.

Today I want to talk about self-care, and why it’s the number 1 priority.

Let’s start with what it is

Self-care is all of those things that, taken collectively, fill your energetic well.

Sometimes, often these days, it’s reduced to things that amount to relaxation: taking a hot bath, reading a good book. While those are also great, they aren’t what I’m talking about when I talk about self-care as the #1 priority.

I’m talking about getting enough sleep. I’m talking about eating regularly. I’m talking about taking your meds on time. I’m talking about showering on the regular.

I don’t even mean “eat healthy, preferably home-cooked food.” I just mean eat. Something.

You can think about it in levels.

• Level 1: Sleep every night. Eat something at least 3x a day. Take your meds. Shower at least twice a week.
• Level 2: Sleep at least eight hours. Eat foods that actively support you (i.e., nothing you’re allergic or sensitive to). Get sunshine on your face every day. (Plus everything in level 1.)
• Level 3: Sleep as much as you need, when you need it. Eat foods that make you feel your best. Move your body in whatever ways feel good and supportive to you. (Plus everything in level 2.)

When we get busy and overwhelmed, when we get emotionally tangled, when we’re in the middle of transition and trying to figure out what the hell is going on in our lives, we can lose track of even the basics in level 1. We don’t sleep. We forget to eat. Meds happen irregularly if at all. We shower if we’re leaving the house.

Basic self-care is essential to the system

As much as I would sometimes like to be a brain in a jar, I am not. Neither are you.

When life is going along, when we’re doing these things as a matter of course, we don’t necessarily notice how essential they are, because we’ve got enough of a balance going on that if we miss one meal, our lives don’t fall apart. If we stay up all night to get something finished, we’ll have a day or two of groggy functioning. Eh, big deal.

If those things happened regularly, though, you’d feel the effects. Your hunger cues would go wonky, or you’d go to bed and feel tired but wired and unable to fall asleep. You’d start having trouble remembering things, and you’d notice yourself getting clumsy. Tasks you were used to completing easily would feel more complicated.

When you’re in the middle of transitions or emotionally stressful times, two things happen at once. You’re using more energy, so you need more of that self-care to accommodate that, and your routines get thrown off, making it harder for the self-care to happen.

This is why I stress self-care so much. When you need it most is when you’re most likely to be having a hard time giving it to yourself. Unless you consciously insist on at least level 1 self-care, things are going to go badly. I can pretty much guarantee that. Even if you can pull it off for a while, there is an expiration date on that coping and the recovery will be epic.

If you’re even considering leaving, you need more self-care than usual. If you’re actually leaving and you’re in that transition, you need a lot more self-care than usual.

Sure, if you can include relaxing and fun things in your life, do it! But when we’re in transition, there isn’t usually space for that. Commit to level 1 self-care. Aim for level 3. Decide that some is always better than none. You might have to triage some other parts of your life to prioritize the amount of self-care you need. Remember that you are the essential ingredient here.

As much as possible during this period of chaos and upheaval and intensity, be good to yourself.

I’ve been talking, the last few weeks, about the four things I say most often to leaving academics.

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.

Today I want to talk about grief, because this is one of those topics that gets shoved under the rug. Grief is messy. Grief is inconvenient. Grief isn’t practical.

Grief is absolutely essential.

Grief does work

We have a tendency to think about emotions as extraneous. They’re what get in the way of thinking, planning, getting on with things.

And that’s sometimes true. When we’ve bottled up our emotions, when we’ve avoided them, they get kind of piled up and they just shoot out at the least convenient, most awkward times.

When we’re able to show up to them as they happen, however, they do work. Anger helps us identify crossed boundaries and re-sets them. Fear helps us identify the need for increased safety. And sadness and grief help us let go.

I don’t pretend to know how this happens, only that it’s true to my experience. Grieving is part of how we let go and move on. It’s part of how we acknowledge the shift.

But make no mistake about it: Grief is work. It is exhausting. It saps your energy, it dulls your interest in other things, it can make you want to do nothing but sleep. Within reason, let it. (As always, if it starts significantly impairing your ability to go on, please see a doctor. Grief and depression aren’t the same thing, but they can overlap or be triggered by one another.)

A tale of two griefs

When I left academia, I didn’t give myself any room to grieve. I worked my last day in higher ed on a Friday, and I started my new job, a couple hundred miles away, on Monday. That Monday evening, I went out to meet friends at an event, and that was the pattern for a long time. I worked, I did household stuff, I saw friends. I acted like it wasn’t a big deal. On some level I didn’t think it should be a big deal.

Of course it was a big deal. How could it not be? I had spent the previous eleven years of my life — more than a third of my existence — either being a professor or having professorship as my goal.

So my grief was in there, but I tried to ignore it and it came out at all the wrong times. When a friend’s husband was considering applying for the job I left, I got angry and tried to talk him out of it. I woke up in the middle of the night, sobbing for no reason I could identify. I alternately read everything I could on academia and wanted nothing to do with it.

Eventually, years later, I was able to slow down and show up to my grief. At that point it was like a spelunking mission. I had to dig it out, find the pieces I’d shoved down into the darkness. I had to make space in a life that had moved on. I had to untangled the grief from later choices, from new opportunities, from my health. I don’t recommend it.

Some years later, my sweetie and I decided to let go of a long-cherished dream of being parents. I must have gained some skills in the intervening years, because when the grief welled up — and it welled up off and on for years — I just … let it. I didn’t try to justify it or argue with it. I didn’t beat myself up or reconsider the decision or even start telling myself how awful it all was. When I was aware of any thoughts at all, they amounted to some version of “yes, I really wanted that, and it’s not going to happen, and that’s worth grieving.”

But here’s the difference: When each spate of grieving passed, it passed. I might feel a little emotionally tender for the rest of the day, but I was able to snuggle the babies of friends, attend baby showers, and generally celebrate and support parenthood elsewhere. I am not, all these years later, finding bits and pieces of that grief transmuted to bitterness that comes out an inappropriate times.

Sometimes, often, that grief looked like sadness and tears. Every once in a while, it looked like anger and I would shake my fist at the heavens. It’s not that it always showed up in the same way, and heaven knows it wasn’t particularly convenient. But when I was present to it when it showed up, or when I made space for it when I couldn’t be present to it in the moment, it did its work and dissipated.

Please, grieve

If you’re leaving academia, you’re experiencing a great loss. It may be the best available choice. It may even be exciting and compelling. There’s still a great loss under there.

The more you can show up to the grief, the more you can let it move through you rather than trying not to have it, the easier a time you will ultimately have.

If your life is particularly full and you don’t have the room to experience the grief as it shows up, make a regular appointment with yourself and grieve. Wear your comfiest clothes, wrap yourself in a snuggly blanket, hide out in a room with all the lights off and blinds drawn, and grieve. Say to yourself, this is something I deeply wanted, it was important to me, and it is worth grieving. Let whatever comes up come up.

It doesn’t say anything about you that something you wanted didn’t work out. It happens to everyone. It doesn’t make you a failure. It makes you human.

Welcome to the ranks of humanity. We have all had things we wanted not turn out. We have all grieved. This is simply when and how it is showing up for you.

Be gentle with yourself, accept the grief, and know that it will fade.

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.