Before I was able to take the actual steps that would let me leave academia, I spent a lot of time daydreaming. You know, of that perfect job I didn’t hate, of being able to ride off into the sunset of a different life.

What I really wanted was to not have to decide to leave academia. I wanted it to just happen, so that I didn’t have to take responsibility for making this hard decision, for explaining it to skeptical friends, for doing the work of figuring out how to translate my academic work to a non-academic audience, for moving us away from a town we loved that had no jobs to a city we didn’t love that had opportunities for us.

I wanted to skip all the parts I didn’t know how to do and move right into the better part. That included the emotional stuff — I wanted to skip right over the grief of leaving, the disorientation of reimagining myself, the having to meet new people.

And from this vantage point, years later, I have so much compassion for the me who was struggling through this. Of course I wanted to skip the hard parts. Of course I wanted to just fast-forward to the next bit. Why wouldn’t I?

But at the time, I alternated between wanting the magic wand and beating myself up for not just getting a grip and doing things already. As you can imagine, castigating myself didn’t actually make me any more likely to do anything.

What finally did get me moving was hitting my own personal breaking point, that moment when it felt easier to do anything, anything at all rather than stay where I was.

I know some of you are in this space now, the dreaming of other possibilities while being stuck with the actual practical steps. If you can avoid beating yourself up for this and instead accept that this is part of the process, even a necessary part of the process, it’ll be easier on you. You’ll hit the point when it’s easier to make change than to stay where you are, and when you do, you’ll make change.

I can’t promise it’ll be easy. But when that day hits, you’ll be shocked at how fast you can change your life.

I have a friend who is heading a tiny little tech start-up. He and some friends have been dreaming and coding and testing and talking it up, all in the spare hours around dayjobs and with whatever money they can scrounge from their budgets and their credit cards.

A few weeks ago, he was offered some venture capital funding.

It’s what every start-up wants, right? You might think so, but my friend is really conflicted about it for all kinds of reasons.

Basically, it looks good on paper, but it doesn’t feel like the right choice.

Paper lies

We’ve all had the experience of having something or someone look perfect on paper and not work out in reality. Or look like a disaster on paper and be absolutely fabulous in reality.

The guy who has all the right degrees and interests, but is really annoying in person. The job that looks really odd, but is really fun when you’re actually doing it.

When we say something looks good on paper, what we’re really pointing to is that is makes sense within the cultural narratives that apply. Good benefits, good alignment with our degree, a good job, a good family.

A lot of our lives get left out of the cultural narrative. Our quirky personalities. Our specific histories. Our actual likes.

Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, has as one of her Secrets of Adulthood this gem: “You can choose what you do; you can’t choose what you LIKE to do.”

Trying to force ourselves to like what we don’t like – however much it makes “sense” in some way – is a sure-fire way to making ourselves quietly miserable.

Academia loves paper

There are a lot of things that “make sense” in academia that run counter to many people’s actual experience.

The flexibility is to die for – unless you want to work reasonable hours and have things in your life other than work.

Professoring is the best job in the world – unless it doesn’t work for your particular personality and skills and needs.

Etc. I’m sure you can think of lots of others.

The problem is not you

The problem is a cultural narrative that insists that certain things are universally good – for everyone, or at least all good people.

But you know what? People vary. Even within communities like academia, which bring people together around some shared values or goals, people vary.

You are allowed to vary. You are allowed to be your own particular, fabulous self.

And you don’t need to apologize for that.

Academia tends to spin our emotional compasses until we don’t know which way is north. If you’re feeling lost, I offer one-on-one coaching to help you figure it all out.

I’ve had several conversations lately with clients who are feeling caught between their old plans and their current selves.

Once upon a time, they knew how their lives would go. They would go to graduate school. They would get a job directly related to their degree. Everything else would fall in place around that.

Except somewhere along the line, something changed. Maybe they got married. Maybe they had a kid. Maybe they got interested in something else.

And now they’re anxious that not following through on the original plan means something bad about them, that they’re lazy or weak or insert-your-favorite-self-insult-here.

All it means is that your plans changed

There’s a famous adage in both military and entrepreneurial circles that goes something like this:

Plans are useless, but planning is priceless.

It reflects the reality that baby, this world is complicated and chaotic and it keeps right on moving, so there’s no possible way that any plan could take into account all the different variables so completely that everything will turn out as you planned. Life happens.

And yet, it’s still helpful to plan, because planning asks us to articulate our goals and think about how to solve that problem, and that gets us further along the path than picking daisies. (Not that I’m against picking daisies!)

All of which is to say, of course your plans have changed

Many of us started graduate school in our early twenties. I would really hope that things in our early or mid-thirties are different than we expected back when we made our master plans back in our early twenties.

First of all, that’s another ten-odd years of life informing us. Complicated, messy, rich, beautiful, life. We know things now we didn’t then. We understand what’s important to us in a way we might not have then. We’ve probably had a few more hard knocks and challenges to help us put things into perspective.

Second of all, the world hasn’t stopped. Stuff has changed around us, and maybe the world doesn’t offer the same opportunities we thought it would. Jobs exist now that didn’t then. (Whole industries exist now that didn’t exist when I started grad school. The internet didn’t exist for everyday people when I started grad school.)

In other words, I’d actually be a little bit worried if nothing in your plans had changed since you started grad school.

We are not computers

There’s a cultural narrative that suggests that we should follow through completely on everything we start, that quitting is, well, quitting. But that’s so very computer-metaphor-driven.

We aren’t computers. We’re organic systems. And organic systems flow and adapt. We respond.

In other words, your plans changing based on your life progressing? That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work.

So, if you can, try not to beat yourself up for the reality that plans change. Plans always change, because we live complicated, messy, long lives. And isn’t it beautiful?

Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.