Deserve. It’s such a little word for such a big, tangled set of things.

I want to spend a little time untangling it today, because it’s underneath so much of our pain and our grief.

Two, two kinds of deserve (ah ah ah)

Deserve tends to show up in two different ways.

The first has a tinge of self-righteousness to it. “Don’t I deserve a good job after all the hard work I did?” Well yes, you do deserve a good job. But so does everyone else.

The second has a tinge of despair to it. “I don’t deserve a good job / nice colleagues / decent pay because I haven’t worked hard enough / someone else is better / I’m not good at X.” Oh sweetie. You deserve all kinds of good things.

Both versions of deserve are predicated on two assumptions:

1)      That we’re somehow special, different, set apart. (Those other people, they didn’t work as hard as I did, or they aren’t as smart as I am, or they have special privileges I don’t get to have, or they’re all competent and I’m the lone idiot.)

2)      That our inherent worth has anything at all to do with things like jobs, degrees, or self-improvement.

It’s the combination of these two assumptions that leads so many of us to believe that if we didn’t get the job, it’s because we suck as a human being, or to believe that we have no options, or to believe that nothing we’ll do will change our situation.

And both of those assumptions are based in fear. Fear of being different. Fear of being not good enough. Fear of failure.

You deserve everything

You are inherently worthy just as you are right now. And I mean right now, with bedhead and unfinished to-do lists and applications that have gotten no responses and complicated relationships and more pounds than you would like.

Right now. Just as you are. You are worthy. You are a gift of the Universe.

You deserve happiness. You deserve a good job with good pay doing work you love. You deserve amazing relationships that buoy you up and challenge you and help you grow. You deserve a nice home.

And so does everyone else.

Our modern economic systems aren’t set up to support everyone having what they deserve. When we get good things, there’s an element of luck to it, because there’s someone out there who worked just as hard who didn’t get this blessing. And when we don’t get good things, there’s an element of luck to it, because there’s someone else out there, with all of our faults and problems, who did get this good thing.

Sure, qualifications and hard work and being nice, they all matter. But this world we live in is powered largely by luck.

The economic and racial and social situation you were born into is a matter of luck. Being born here instead of someplace else is luck. Fitting a job situation well enough to get an offer is luck – there are lots of applicants who could rock any given position. Being born at a moment in time when there are more jobs than applicants or the reverse is luck.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a good wallow in deserve. It can be cathartic to rage at the universe because you deserved that job that someone else was offered. It can be almost pleasurable to moan about how we don’t deserve the good things because we didn’t eat our carrots.

But when we get stuck there, we stop taking action on our own behalf. And that’s a sure-fire way to not getting those good things you want.

Do this instead

Don’t take it personally that our modern economy isn’t set up to actually take care of actual human beings. That has nothing to do with you. Yes, that’s true differentially, that is, it’s set up to take more care of some people than others, but again – that’s not about you as an individual.

Okay, but how do you do that? (I hate it when I’m told to stop taking something personally with nothing else – exactly how am I supposed to do that?)

When you start noticing yourself using the language or assumptions of deserve, don’t try to stop yourself. What we repress returns even stronger. Instead, take a page from Barbara Sher’s book and ham it up!

If you think you deserve better than you’re getting, then go all diva on the Universe’s ass and tell it so, as dramatically and expressively as possible. Keep pushing yourself to get more dramatic and more demanding, until it’s so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh. (“And you know what, Universe? I deserve a PONY!”)

If you think you don’t deserve goodness, then go all diva on the Universe’s ass and tell it so, as dramatically and expressively as possible. Get more dramatic and more self-pitying until it’s so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh. (“I don’t even deserve to have a nose to breath air through! I should look like Voldemort!)

The feelings you’re having – the feelings of grief, of sadness, of anger, of fear – those are real. Those are what are underneath our language about deserving. When we give voice to them in these over-the-top ways, it’s a way of acknowledging them and giving them some room to breathe.

When they have room to breathe, then they aren’t in charge. And when they aren’t in charge, we can act on our own behalves, knowing that society isn’t fair, that there are roadblocks, that everything isn’t necessarily going to work out just as we had planned.

And that we’re worthy beings, either way.

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 been thinking a lot about the term “post-academic” and what it means, so I’d like to unpack it a little bit here. And I’d love to know how my definitions fit with and don’t fit with yours.

It incorporates academia

No matter how far away we go from academia, those of us who were academically inclined enough to actually head to graduate school will always carry some version of academia with us.

Maybe it’s the theoretical constructs that reconfigured the world we thought we lived in. Maybe it’s habits of close reading. Maybe it’s a tendency to head to the library to answer our questions about the world. Maybe it’s the belief that individuals can create knowledge.

Maybe it’s an deeper understanding of both exploitative labor practices and ideology. Maybe it’s a cynicism about our own idealism.

Whatever it is, our experience in academia – both positive and negative – comes with us as we move away from the Ivory Tower. We don’t ever leave it truly behind, although you’d be surprised just how distant it can feel.

It’s about something else

Post-academics aren’t failed academics. We all walked away for our own reasons, reasons that both did and didn’t intersect with the structural problems inherent in higher ed. At some point, we chose something else.

I want to emphasize that, because so many of us have felt backed into a corner by the shitty job market and the shiny optimism of professors who haven’t been on the job market since Moses was a lad. It doesn’t always feel like we chose something else. But somehow, somewhen, we did, even if we can only articulate it as “I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

And that choice, while it’s going to be colored by our experiences and our skills, most of which were honed in academia, isn’t only “anything but academia.” There’s always an element of “this, not that.”

Ultimately, becoming post-academic is about choosing to orient yourself a different direction. As such it’s about recognizing academia as one space among others.

We find ourselves again

One of the most comment stories I hear from people coming out of academia is that, in their long years inside the Ivory Tower, they’ve lost something of themselves.

Maybe it’s a natural optimism that got laid down for a more-popular cynicism. Maybe it’s a love of “low” culture. Maybe it’s a work-life balance that allows for both meaningful work and a personal life that isn’t always rushed and shoved into corners.

When we change contexts, these parts of ourselves we’ve disavowed can come back. We can look on them with new eyes and notice the parts we want to invite back in.

It’s about strength

What I most notice as I’m working with post-academics is a kind of strength. In most of us there’s a sense of having lived through something challenging, maybe even life-changing. Even when we’re desperately sad, or scared that we have no other options, there’s an underlying strength in the ability to see what’s going on, to be considering another life.

I have to say, that’s one of my favorite parts.

Not sure what else you could do with your experience and skills? Check out Choosing Your Career Consciously, a course designed to help you figure out what else you could – or would want to – do.

When you finish your PhD, no matter what your plans for the next right step, you will inevitably encounter a steep, steep learning curve.

Since academic culture tends to inculcate in all of us a deep case of Imposter Syndrome, it’s easy for us to assume that because things are hard, because we’re struggling, because we have to learn still more, we’re doing it wrong.

Worse, we tend to assume that struggle means that we are wrong, that we’re in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing.

The thing that’s wrong is that assumption.

Welcome to transition

I natter on about transition a lot around here, but graduating is a classic transition point. You’re losing your identity as a graduate student, and taking on an identity as a professional, whether that’s as a tenure-track assistant professor, an adjunct, or an employee in a non-academic job.

(In fact, one of the hardest parts of being an adjunct – apart from the being paid a pittance and being jerked around – is the sense of being betwixt and between: no longer  a graduate student, but not quite a professor, either.)

Any time we shift a major point of our own identities, it’s like all hell breaks loose. We vacillate between missing the old identity, being excited by the new identity, and feeling utterly lost and confused and doubting.

And underneath it all is one thought: This is so much harder than I expected it would be.

And that’s okay

The thing is, all that hard, all that vacillation? It’s entirely normal. It’s exactly what happens to everyone when they shift a major point of identity.

Where we often get into trouble is comparing our insides (muddled, confused, wishing desperately for someone to tell us what to do) to other people’s outsides (polished, urbane, confident). We don’t often notice that we’re probably presenting the exact same outside, because we don’t want anyone to know that our insides are so turbulent and painful.

Which only stands to reason that those polished, urbane people you’re comparing yourself to? Their insides are probably as roiled as yours.

Accept the learning curve

The way through is to accept that there’s a difference between graduate school and whatever comes next.

If you’re stepping into the professoriate, you’ve got to learn how to be a colleague. You’ve got to learn how to advise, and participate in committee meetings, and propel your own research without an advisor there as goad and check.

If you’re stepping outside of academia, you’ve got to learn an entirely different culture, with different values and practices. You’ve got to learn a different way of working. You’ve got to learn a different way of engaging the topic at hand.

In short, there’s a lot of learning to be done.

Good thing you’re good at learning

One of the characteristics that unites most academics is this: You’re really good at learning things. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have done so well in school. But you’re the person who loved learning and school and the topic so much you voluntarily signed on for more.

You’ve got mad skills to bring to this problem.

But unlike all those years in school, now you’ve got no one to tell you how to learn this stuff. There’s no syllabus, there’s no reading list. There are no office hours.

What you’ve got is this: your own skill at learning (and teaching!) and people who’ve done this before.

Be a teacher and find a mentor

Most of us taught our way through graduate school in one way or another. We know how to take a complicated subject and break it into its component parts and teach those parts and the whole to someone who may not have our facility with the subject.

And we can do the same thing with a new context. We can identify component parts: tasks, hierarchies of power, unspoken assumptions, cultural norms. And then we can use these brilliant brains of ours to figure them out.

Finding yourself a mentor – someone who’s done this before – will help speed up the process, because they’ll be a person you can ask questions of and test your own theories on. Is this how the decision-making structure really works? What’s going on with that odd tension you saw in the last meeting?

But keep in mind that a mentor isn’t a teacher. It’s not their job to do the work to define what you need to learn and devise a way to do that. That’s your job.

You can do this

You’ve done things like this before. Remember the first month or two of graduate school, when everything seemed incredibly complicated and you weren’t sure it would ever make sense?

By now, all those things that confused you are second nature.

The same thing will happen here. You just have to trust yourself and know that this is all part of the process.

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.