When I was considering leaving academia, I kept getting hung up on one thing: was my perpetual dissatisfaction a good enough reason to go?

The other people I knew who’d left had what seemed to me to be better, nearly inarguable reasons for walking away from the career that everyone around me lauded as the only authentic, vibrant option. One never landed an interview, much less a tenure-track job, and could no longer justify cobbling together teaching and a hotel front-desk job. Another was limited to a small geographic orbit that prevented the kind of national job search that is most people’s only hope these days. Others were politicized by — and ostracized because of — grad student unionization drives.

I didn’t see many examples of people leaving after they landed a tenure-track job, that holy of holies, unless they went up for tenure and didn’t make it, and when that happened, the usual response was a polite clucking about their having known the expectations for six — count ’em, six! — years. (Nevermind the slow demise of academic publishing and gendered service expectations.)

Oh, I heard tell of people who walked away from academia for political reasons (the increased reliance on adjuncts instead of full-time faculty, for example) even after they received tenure, but that wasn’t what I saw happening around me. No, if people left, it was because they were forced out or never let in to begin with.

Frankly, I was lucky and I knew it. Oh, I worked hard — class work and comps and proposal and dissertation and defense and MLA interviews and campus interviews — but I knew plenty of people who worked just as hard and didn’t manage to catch the breaks I did in the job search.

I was lucky, profoundly lucky, and turning my back on that luck seemed, well, churlish.

But despite all of that, I didn’t feel lucky. I felt dispirited, enervated, depressed, and annoyed — and all of that meant I wasn’t getting a thing done. I tried pep talks, exercise, anti-depressants, regimented organizational systems, pretty calendars (office supplies nearly always help!), writing groups, and whining. Nothing worked. I fidgeted time away and continued to feel miserable.

Finally, after seriously trying the patience of my lovely wife, I decided that despite a decade of my life and tens of thousands of dollars, I deserved to be happy in my life. Not only that, the job deserved to have someone happy to perform it. I owed it to myself, I owed it to the profession, and I owed it to the other poor job-seekers out there.

Here’s my bottom line: You deserve to be happy. In fact, you owe it to yourself and to everyone who loves you to be happy. If you are unhappy, then you have an obligation to do the work to figure out how to become happy.

Maybe that means jumping ship. Maybe that means finding a different position that fits you better. Maybe that means giving up some commitments or taking on others. Maybe it means taking some risks. Maybe it means setting some boundaries. Maybe it means making the space and taking the time to indulge hobbies you love.

Only you know what will make you happy. But if you are unhappy, that alone is a good enough reason to make change happen in your life, whatever that change needs to look like.

When I was frantically trying to figure out what could possibly do with my life after academia, I read article after article telling me to list out my skills and then figure out who might need those.

That was, perhaps, the most demoralizing part of the whole experience.

I didn’t get into academia because I had the skills to succeed there, although having those skills didn’t hurt. I got into academia because I had a passion for writing and reading, because I wanted to change the world for the better, because I wanted what I imagined the life of a professor to be like: deep and intelligent conversations around every corner, huge swathes of time to sit and think.

Yes, it was naïve, but finding out that’s not really what happens in this day and age didn’t change the fact that that’s what I was looking for, the kind of life I wanted to have. And here I was being told all of my passion, all of my idealism, was nothing except a vehicle for my ability to write a coherent sentence.

I’m here to tell you: It’s not true.

Yes, your skills matter. My writing skills got me in the door of all of my jobs outside of academia, because they’re what my employers needed to fulfill their missions.

But you won’t be any happier outside of academia than you were inside of it if the life you’re leading isn’t any more attuned to your passions and your ideals.

So start there — what is it you deeply believe? What do you think you’re called to do in this world? What is the work that’s yours to do, the work that isn’t going to get done if you don’t step up and do it? What are you passionate about? What moves you? What gets you excited?

Do your best to be specific. Teaching is really broad and even vague — but “I want to help people learn to think critically about the experience of women in 21^st century America” can get you somewhere.

Once you’ve articulated your passion, listing your skills to figure out how you can serve that vision just makes good sense. But the skills have to be in service to your passion, not the other way around.

You are far more than your skills. You are, in fact, the site where great work is waiting to be born. So begin there, where it matters.