One of the best, shiniest, and most destructive assumptions we use against ourselves is this one: I should have known.

We say it when something goes wrong. We say it when things don’t turn out the way we thought they would. We say it when things don’t turn out the way we hoped they would. We say it when someone else’s dire predictions come true. We say it when we’re angry, when we’re disappointed, when we’re hurt.

Notice that we rarely say it when something goes right. “This relationship is wonderful – I should have known!” “I won the lottery. I should have known!”

Even when we do say it when things go well, we say it in relief and a little bit of laughing at ourselves for our stressing out. But we don’t blame ourselves for not knowing things were going to work out.

No, it’s exclusively a way to beat ourselves up by assigning ourselves the blame for things not working out, no matter what things we’re talking about.

It’s a lie

At base, it assumes that we can, actually, control things, and that in this particular instance we screwed up – instead of acknowledging the reality that the world is complex and variable and dynamic and shit happens that we couldn’t possibly predict or control.

Somehow, it’s easier to believe that we’re screw-ups than it is to believe that there are things we don’t get to be in charge of.

But sweeties. There are things we don’t get to be in charge of. Lots of things.

You aren’t in charge of the economy and how it affects higher education. You aren’t in charge of whether universities post jobs or how they fill them. You aren’t in charge of the way graduate school shapes you and your hopes. (Ideology, man. It happens.) You aren’t in charge of who else is out there, applying for jobs. You aren’t in charge of how many people are getting PhDs. You aren’t in charge of your advisors and their idiosyncracies. You aren’t in charge of how available jobs map on to your very legitimate geographic limitations.

The more we can distinguish between what we are in charge of (how many applications we send out, whether we send them out, other opportunities we pursue, how much time we spend on it, what kind of help and feedback we get, how much we work on our emotional gunk, how much time we spend exploring our options) and what we aren’t in charge of, the happier we’ll be.

Breathe

I once heard a great quotation, and of course I can’t remember now who said it. (The Dalai Lama? Thich Nhat Hahn?) “If you can’t do anything, don’t worry. If you can do something, don’t worry.”

In other words, do the parts that are yours to do. Let go of everything else. It’s not easy, but it’s a hell of a lot easier than trying to control the universe which, you know, is pretty much guaranteed to fail.

Our culture does a piss-poor job of dealing with grief and mourning. A friend of mine who lost a late-stage pregnancy reports that people actually turned around and ran away from her in the halls in the weeks afterwards. No joke.

If we’re that bad at dealing with actual death, just think for a minute about how bad we are at loss that is less tangible.

You will grieve

Even if you got to the stage of things where you were so disgusted by everything that you were glad to close the book on that chapter of your life, you will grieve. If you got a tenure-track job and decided you didn’t like, it you will grieve. If you didn’t get a job when you really wanted one, you will grieve.

No matter how you get to the point of leaving, you will grieve. Even if you want to go.

Because leaving isn’t just leaving. Leaving means letting go of the whole future narrative of your life that you’d been aiming at. It means facing a future you don’t know the contours of. It means giving up the dreams you had about what this career path would be for you.

Even if you had no emotional hangups about it at all (okay, probably not possible), you would still grieve. Sadness and grieving do the work of letting go. They’re HOW we let go.

It takes time

I’m sorry to tell you this, but grief is a process. Forget that whole Kubler-Ross thing (it’s accurate for sudden and shocking change; not so much for grief) — grief is more like sitting on the shore, letting the waves lap around you. Sometimes, at high tide, they submerge you entirely. Other times, at low tide, they’re just licking at your toes. But they go away, they come back, and while there’s a general rhythm, you can’t exactly predict it.

It takes time. You’ve probably spent a decade in academia. That entire time, you had a vision of who you would be, the career you would have, the life you would live. When you leave, you lose all of that.

I’ve talked to so many clients who think they should be over it already, when “already” can be measured in weeks or months.

Oh sweetie. You should not be over it already

This is big, and profound, and significant. It will take longer than a headcold to get over. It will almost certainly take longer than you’d like it to.

But if you can really feel the sadness and the grief — the bodily sensations, the crying, not the narrative about it — the worst of it will pass relatively quickly.

Weirdly, you’ll actually get over it much more quickly by explicitly giving yourself time and space to grieve. It can feel like it will pull you under and never let you go, that if you start actually grieving you’ll never stop.

But you will stop. The grief will run its course. And it will take so much less of you with it if you can open to it.

So go ahead. Grieve. You deserve to acknowledge what you’ve lost. It matters that you lost it.

It sucks, and I’m so sorry.