What’s it like to leave academia?
Hello! Heads up that in this article I make brief mention of passive suicidal thoughts (i.e. repetitive thoughts about death without any specific plans to do anything about it). If that sounds like something you’d rather not read about, try one of my other blogs.
I grew up in Cornwall, as you will almost certainly know if you have spent more than 15 minutes of one-on-one time with me. (It just tends to… come out. For some reason it’s important to me that people understand from early on that I am not English. No, really. Cornish people are British, but we’re not English.)
Though my parents’ house is about as far from the coast as you can get in Cornwall, I still spent a lot of my childhood at the beach. It was delightful, other than the sand. And the sharp rocks. And the rip currents. And the time my brother nearly got swept away by the sea in Trebarwith. And the time I was waist-deep in the water and got upended by a wave I didn’t see coming.
Look: the sea can – and will – completely fuck you up. It’s enormous, formidable, and doesn’t care about you.
And yet, the north coast of Cornwall is also stuffed with surfers who, from a distance, give every impression of being completely unbothered by the power of the sea.
So one day, I decided to have a surfing lesson.
It was terrifying. Theoretically, I knew it was possible that I could learn to catch a wave and ride it. But I could barely even get to my feet, and every time I did I fell off. The waves, small as they were that day, kept knocking me over, again and again.
Academia felt like that.
By most metrics, I was a pretty successful academic: I had collaborations, high-impact publications, excellent student feedback, and – for the last two years of my time in academia – I even had a permanent contract.
I was also miserable.
For a while I was able to ignore my misery, because I was doing a lot of teaching and that was always the part of the job that I liked best.
And then I couldn’t ignore it any more. One day, after a lecture, I was answering student questions. At least, I think I was answering them. I don’t really know, because all I remember is a panicked internal shrieking: “I wish I didn’t exist. I wish I didn’t exist. I wish I didn’t exist.”
I know now that some of the problem was my ADHD. I wasn’t medicated, wasn’t diagnosed, didn’t even suspect it at that point in my life – all I knew was that I was very, very anxious, and at some point that tipped over into depression.
But a much larger problem was that academia could – and did – completely fuck me up. It was enormous, formidable, and didn’t care about me.
And I was surrounded by people who seemed, like the surfers, entirely unbothered by the forces at work.
I know now that they almost certainly weren’t actually unbothered. I mean, we all know there’s a mental health crisis in academia, right?
Early career academics spend a lot of their lives trying to capture and saddle the semi-mythical permanent academic contract beast.
I'd done it. I'd spent two years riding the beast as it ate all my time and energy.
And then, in the eyes of a lot of academics, I did the unthinkable. I took it to the stable and handed it back. (It wasn't that simple on the inside, of course. I'm still not sure whether I chose to take the permanent academic contract beast back to the stable or whether it threw me off and trampled on me.)
You're not supposed to take the permanent academic contract beast back to the stable. You're supposed to hang onto it for dear life and thank your lucky stars that at least you're no longer on the temporary academic contract beast, which dies after N months and takes N-1 months to learn to ride.
You're especially not supposed to voluntarily hand over the permanent academic contract beast, go to another stable and ask if you can ride one of theirs instead. You're supposed to be of the opinion that the only beasts worth riding are the ones from the academia stable and to be very upset if there isn't one available.
And I had not only done both these these things, but I was openly, radiantly happy about it.
Which mean I had become a safe person to ask The Question.
The Question usually comes in a quiet, tense undertone, as though the speaker is afraid to say it aloud.
“What’s it like? You know, outside?”
And then they tell me that they’re thinking about leaving but are worried they will regret it.
I have never regretted leaving academia.
Not once.
I miss teaching, but that’s all.
I don’t miss the job insecurity, or the transience, or the implicit and explicit encouragement to put my work above everything else. I don’t miss the way the system was clearly designed by people who’d never really considered what the world might be like if you weren’t in good mental and physical health, or were responsible for child or elder care, or had to deal with the thousand tiny cuts of just existing while being a member of a minoritised group. I don’t miss the narrative that if you choose to leave academia, or if you get pushed out, you have ‘failed’. I don’t miss the constant framing of stress as personal rather than systemic, or the accompanying implication that if I just tried harder, I would magically not be stressed any more.
I especially don’t miss being afraid. I spent years balancing all my fears – about speaking up, about leaving academia, about displaying any sign that others might take as weakness – against the hope of a permanent job.
And when I finally got that permanent job… it wasn’t worth it. It didn’t make me any freer to speak up. It didn’t stop the overwork. It didn’t even stop me being afraid, because I’d been afraid so long it had seeped into every thought about my job, and I’d been over-identifying with my work for so long that my job seemed like the most important thing about me.
It’s been nearly ten years since I left academia. I’ve stopped being afraid, and it’s easier, though still a struggle, to view myself as more than the job I do. It took a lot of practice, but it was worth it.
I’m writing this in October, which was one of the worst times of year for me as an academic. I still remember the creeping dread, the anxiety-bordering-on-nausea of realising that I was feeling vaguely recovered from the previous academic year.
That sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it? That’s because it was one of the ways in which academia fucked me up. Summers came with a temporarily manageable workload. Sometimes I even got stuff done that I’d been putting off all year. But I never got through the backlog. I entered every autumn feeling like I hadn’t been productive enough, and knowing that my workload was about to revert to its standard level of severely overwhelming.
If academia feels or felt this way to you too, I want you to know the problem is not you. The problem was never you.
There is nothing "wrong" with you if working in academia stresses you out.
It. Is. Stressful.
You deserve better support.
Often, wellbeing support offered to academics treats stress as an individual problem, not a systemic problem.
I simply cannot be having with that.
So I made online wellbeing workshops for academics, and I also offer 1:1 career and wellbeing coaching.
In me, you’ll get someone who understands first-hand what it’s like to be an academic and what it’s like to leave academia. I’d love to help you figure out how to distinguish between the systemic and the personal, learn tools for restoring and maintaining your wellbeing, find ways to give and receive effective mutual support, or even decide whether you want to leave academia altogether.