A dear friend of mine once told me that while she looks like a successful academic on paper, she doesn’t experience herself that way. She’s not sure the institution experiences her that way, either.

I hear this all the time, both from graduate students and professors.

And, like everything else in academia, it’s kind of complicated.

Imposter Syndrome

A grad school friend and I coined the term “academic anorexia” to refer to what we later came to know as Imposter Syndrome. Imposter Syndrome is that persistent fear that you aren’t as smart or as capable or as interesting as people seem to think you are, and one day they’ll wake up and know you for the fraud you think you are.

There’s a lot of reasons we all acquire Imposter Syndrome, including being a student for way too long, the competitive and brutal nature of some departments or advisors, the constant evaluation and judgment, and the constant need to triage a workload that is more than anyone can reasonable do.

I’m not sure many of us get out of grad school without a whopping case of it, and it does damage, especially to women.

By undermining our confidence and our trust in our environment (not always falsely, either), Imposter Syndrome keeps us playing small, asking for approval, and constantly doubting ourselves. It’s exhausting and demoralizing.

Being a round peg in a square hole

Sometimes our intellectual and personal quirks make us a bad fit for academia in general or an institution or department in particular.

Collaboration, for example, is an important principle of some feminist scholarship – but collaboration is not only not valued in the Humanities, it’s actively punished by “not counting.”

Being wide rather than deep is the way some of our minds work, but academia is based on each scholar going deep into one particular facet of one particular research angle.

When we don’t fit, we’re constantly running up against barriers and assumptions that tell us we’re doing it wrong.

Telling the difference

Having Imposter Syndrome doesn’t mean you don’t fit academia or your institution or your department or your field. Imposter Syndrome only means that you’re doubting your own excellence, even as you are getting generally positive feedback.

When you don’t fit, however, you’re constantly running up against barriers to being successful in the ways you would naturally operate. Sometimes you can think your way around them, but you’re always having to check yourself and reorient yourself. And sometimes you can’t think your way around them and you’re experiencing negative feedback.

Imposter Syndrome is painful, to be sure, but with some attention and some processing, can be transformed into a balanced sense of what we have to offer.

Lack of fit, however, can only be fixed by moving – to another institution, to another kind of institution, to another department, to something outside academia.

They both suck

Neither one of these is fun. In fact, experientially, they’re both pretty terrible, because neither of them allows you to be your full, beautiful, whip-smart self.

But doubting yourself when everything is generally working isn’t the same as not fitting. That self-doubt needs compassion, to be sure, and care, and space to process the underlying fears. But that doubting of your own abilities doesn’t mean you don’t fit. In fact, it probably means you fit really, really well.

All that being said, you don’t have to put up with it. You can, in fact, be in academia and be both confident and happy. I’ve seen it happen. And assuming that academia is where you want to be, you deserve that.

Is leaving really irrevocable?

This is one of the biggest fears – and biggest stumbling blocks – I hear from people who are considering leaving. Once they make the decision to go, they say, there’s no going back.

And to a large extent, they’re right. Especially in a market like this one, where there are dozens, sometimes hundreds, of applicants for any given open position, hiring committees aren’t likely to look closely at someone who has left and returned when they’ve got application after application from bright young things just out of graduate school, bearing the latest theory and impressive credentials.

But that doesn’t mean the situation is quite as clear-cut as all that.

There are exceptions to every rule

This you-can’t-go-home-again bias is more true in the humanities than in the social sciences, business, or the hard sciences. Not only are the humanities the hardest hit in the undersupply of jobs and oversupply of PhDs, but the humanities encompass the fields that put the least value on practical, hands-on experience.

Many other fields have a long tradition of people moving from industry to higher ed and back. How likely it is in the case of any given academic depends on things as varied as specialty, grant funding, trends in the industry, and the phase of the moon.

The converse is not necessarily true

But often, when I’m talking with people who are afraid that if they walk away, a door closes forever, I’m wondering just how open that door actually is right now.

Given the trends in academia – towards contingent labor, towards less and less public funding, towards increased service obligations, towards fewer viable university presses and journals, towards an ever-more imbalance between the number of PhDs and the number of jobs available – I’m not sure that the door is open for any but a very few, very lucky people who happened to be in the right place at the right time with just exactly the right combination of scholarship and experience and personality.

In other words, the writing may be on the wall even if you aren’t deciding to walk away.

The realities of the job market are not about you

None of this is to say that you aren’t qualified or aren’t deserving or aren’t absolutely brilliant. You are. You are all of those things. You absolutely deserve a real job doing what you love.

Unfortunately, deserve has very little to do with what actually happens. And what is actually happening right now is that many – and I would say most — of the qualified, deserving, brilliant graduates aren’t getting those tenure-track jobs, because they don’t exist. And that’s not because anyone is out to get you, and it’s not because administrators don’t value tenure-track faculty. It’s because we happen to be around during a particular historical moment when the economic circumstances of higher ed are changing in ways that may never reverse.

So when people worry that walking away is irrevocable, what I always want to ask is how likely it is that staying will produce a different outcome. In every case I can think of, it’s not that the door was absolutely closed, but it wasn’t open very far. That’s because when people are honestly considering leaving, it’s because things, for one reason or another, haven’t worked out as planned or hoped.

Some people are going to want to take their chances on that crack, and that’s reasonable. But there will be a point at which that crack disappears and the door is effectively closed. Maybe it’s because you’re too many years out of school and you’re competing with people who are newly graduated. Maybe it’s because your field is being systematically trimmed from various institutions. Maybe it’s because tenure-lines in your field are rapidly disappearing and the only things that are really available are contingent positions.

When that door closes, the question of whether leaving is irrevocable isn’t really relevant anymore.

I hate being the voice of doom

But I hate watching people throw themselves against impossibilities even more. I hate watching bright, amazing people, people who have so much to offer, doubt their own self-worth because the numbers just weren’t in their favor. I hate watching people compromise their own futures by accepting section work that doesn’t pay the bills. I hate watching people get bitter and angry because things haven’t worked out.

This is a particularly horrible time in academia. Maybe it will shift for the better sometime. I really hope it does, because I believe in the importance of higher education and I believe particularly in the value of the humanities. I know too many amazing academics, people who are working hard with increasingly fewer resources, to write it all off.

But I also know too many amazing people who didn’t get the brass ring to believe that this situation is benign. It isn’t.

Walking away may be irrevocable. And if that door is still open a crack and you want to take your chances, power to you. I want every person who wants an academic job to get a good one, because we need that brilliance and dedication. We need it desperately.

But if that door is closed, I hope that you are able to mourn and walk away. Because the rest of the world needs your brilliance and dedication just as desperately.

If you’re walking away but don’t know what else you could do, join Jo VanEvery and me in a six-week class designed to help you figure out what your options are. We start June 12. Click here to find out more.

Have you heard of the soggy potato chip theory? It goes something like this: A kid would always love a crisp, new potato chip, but if soggy potato chips are all there is, they can be satisfying too. It’s an analogy to attention, and the way kids would always prefer positive, supportive attention, but if negative, critical attention is all they can get, they’ll take it. Attention is that important.

Many of us in academia are like those kids.

We want the tenure-track job in our preferred geographic area for a decent wage and a reasonable teaching load. We want friendly colleagues and a supportive research environment. But if adjunct teaching or a non-tenure-track and thus year-to-year job with a high teaching load and crappy conditions is all we are offered, we’ll often take it.

We want so badly to be part of academia, to live that life that we imagined for ourselves that we’ll accept a watered-down version that actively drains us – because it’s less painful than walking away from what we really, actually want.

I say this not in condemnation. Not at all. I say this because walking away from what we want is incredibly, terribly painful.

That’s why it takes so long

It would be great if we could sit down, make a pro and con list, and rationally decide that yep, leaving is the way to go, then dust off our hands and dive in to the process of finding another job, maybe moving.

Maybe that’s how it works for some people. That’s not how it worked for me, and that’s not how it works for most of the people I talk to.

For most of us, it looks more like this. Spend weeks or months or even years miserable and ground down and exhausted. Consider leaving. Get excited about a few possibilities. Look at real estate somewhere we actually want to live. Have a lovely weekend imagining a different life. Go back to work on Monday energized and excited. Teach a great class. Have a nice conversation with a colleague. Start doubting that you really need to leave. Maybe you just need an attitude adjustment. Maybe you just need to buckle down. Spend a few weeks throwing yourself into your work. Find yourself crying or angry for no apparent reason. Start looking at job ads. Find a few that seem exciting. Sit down to try to draft an application. Freak out and decide you’re staying.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Leaving is a process, not a point

You are going to doubt yourself. You are going to question every single one of the experiences that led you to consider leaving in the first place. (Maybe they weren’t that bad.) You are going to go back and forth between hope and despair. You are going to try to talk yourself into staying. You are going to try to talk yourself into leaving. There may be weeks when you get nothing done at all, in any direction.

This is completely normal.

Leaving academia is an enormous thing. It affects your identity, it affects your sense of the rightness of the world, it affects your belief in yourself.

None of that means that you’re a bad person, or that you should stay or that you should go. It means only that you’re grappling with something huge, something that will likely be a fork in the road.

It is not fun. But it is normal.

Ways to make it a little bit easier

If you can accept that this is as much a part of the process as everything else – i.e., you avoid beating yourself up for all of the back-and-forthing – it’ll be easier on you.

If you can give yourself the space and understanding and compassion to just watch all of the doubts and fears and hopes and dreams arise, you’ll learn something about what you really want and what matters to you and what’s standing in your way.

If you can be patient, you’ll arrive at a point that has some foundation to it. You’ll find a place to stand and a decision you’re committed to, however scary it is.

If part of what’s standing in your way is a fear that there’s nothing else you’re qualified to do, join Jo VanEvery and me for a six-week class designed to help you expand your sense of what careers are possible for you. It starts June 12, and you can find out more by clicking here.