As I think I’ve mentioned before, my wife has spent the last few years going through seminary, internship, and all of the accompanying institutional work. From my outsider’s perspective, it’s been remarkably like academia, right down to the vocation, low pay, institutional hurdles, and the mythology.

In the end, she decided that congregational ministry wasn’t for her, and for a while she turned her attention to applying for jobs.

Despite all the conversations we’ve had over the years, she became temporarily convinced that because she wasn’t going to get a job doing what she had trained for (ministry), she was limited to jobs in the fields she’d had before she went back to school: fundraising or telemarketing. The problem was, she didn’t want to go back into fundraising or telemarketing, having left them both for good reasons. Cue the spiral of panic: if she wasn’t going to be a minister, and she didn’t want to do fundraising or telemarketing, she was never going to get a job.

Now, I’ve spent too long talking to people switching careers to believe any of this, but it makes complete sense that it was part of her process

Transition is hard. Transition is destabilizing. Transition is exhausting, which makes things like figuring out the next steps of your life even more challenging. Leaving a career path you trained for, that was part of your identity, is most certainly a transition.

When you’re in the middle of a transition, it can be a challenge not to walk into walls. (No really — coordination goes to shit.) In that context, is it any wonder that trying to think beyond the categories of familiar career paths doesn’t happen naturally?

We eventually had a conversation, my wife and I, in which I told her about all the different jobs my friends do, and reminded her of all the various jobs I’ve done over the years. None of them were the kinds of jobs that emerge linearly from degrees, and none of them were the kinds of jobs it’s easy to know about from the outside. But once we started talking about them, she realized that she could totally do that one! And that one! Okay, not that one, her ability to manage paper is negligible, but the one over there, that involved corralling people? Right up her alley.

This is why I tend to say four things over and over again when I’m working with people who are 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.

You’re going to be okay. You’re going to figure it out. And it makes total sense if, along the way, you have a few meltdowns of the “I’m doomed” variety. Not because you are doomed, but because that just seems to be part of the process.

Every year, on the winter solstice, my wife and I have a day without electric lights. We light the fire. We light candles. We open the blinds for the little natural light there is.

We spend the day going inward. We nap, we journal, we dream, we plan. We also cook dinner by candlelight, which makes a godalmighty mess, but there’s something lovely about it at the same time.

We wanted a day where we were able to really experience the turning of the year, but it also serves another purpose: reminding us that the light will return.

There isn’t much difference in the length of today and the length of tomorrow and the length of the day after that. This is the end of the pendulum swing, when the changes slow down to stop, and then slowly reverse before catching momentum and zooming through the equinox.

But in a week or two, you’ll start to see the difference, and in a month, you’ll know. The light is returning, literally and, I would argue, figuratively.

Whatever transition you’re facing right now, the light will return. Not as fast as you’d like, perhaps, or not necessarily in the way you’d prefer. But the light will return, because the world we live in moves and changes and frequently moves and changes in cycles.

Happy Solstice, friends. I’m lifting my mug of tea to you.