Moving on: Grieving your losses when leaving academia

leaving academia

You can only lose what you cling to. ~ Gautama Buddha

When you decide to leave academia, one of the first emotions you will have to deal with is grief.

I had to experience these emotions of grief and failure, along with many others, when I decided to leave a PhD program in Higher Education Administration at The University of Texas at Austin. It’s not easy to leave a dream behind that you’ve held for many, many years. It was literally painful. I felt tightness in my chest for days, a clenching around my heart like it was being squeezed with a fist. Ouch.

Most people who decide to leave academia, whether before they finish a Ph.D. or afterward, have usually invested an enormous amount of time and energy into this process. For example, you may have been studying ethics since you were an undergraduate, taken coursework and written papers on this in graduate school, given papers at conferences, and argued your position in a doctoral defense. You may have spent as many as ten years and thousands of dollars getting your degree.

You have invested yourself and may find your identity is now tied to your particular area of study. So often I hear people describing themselves this way: “I am a scholar of moral philosophy working on Descartes.” It’s pretty embedded in your psyche at this point. And you are now being told you need to “let it all go” to leave academia behind.

Letting go

I don’t believe you have to let it ALL go, but you may have to let go of your dream of being a professor, teaching undergraduates at a liberal arts college. And that means you must go through the agonizing process of grieving what you will not get. It doesn’t matter why you are leaving, whether it’s because there simply are not enough academic jobs to go around or because you have decided the rewards of life in academia no longer mesh with your own values or needs. Maybe you don’t want to move to a small town in Iowa. Maybe you need more money to raise children. It really doesn’t matter why.  What matters is whether you have given yourself time to grieve the loss of the old dream.

It’s truly like having a broken heart. It takes a physical toll on your body, as well as your mind. You may not be able to sleep. You may have anxiety and panic attacks that quite literally create heart palpitations. Crying and withdrawing from the world is normal. Feeling sad and adrift in the world is normal, too.

Much like the advice given to dating partners after breaking up, actually naming your feeling of grief and allowing the emotion to the surface can actually help you move on. Erin Bartram’s widely read essay, The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind (February 11, 2018) notes that there are actually multiple losses: financial, intellectual, and social. And yet she felt she had no right to grieve.

As she says, “Despite the abundance of “quit lit” out there, we’re still not, as a community of scholars, doing a great job dealing with this thing that happens to us all the time. The genre is almost universally written by those leaving, providing them with an outlet for their sorrow or rage, or allowing them to make an argument about what needs to change.”

In order to truly let go, you must grant yourself the time to grieve, to mourn the loss of your earlier dreams. “Sorrows come to stretch out spaces in the heart for joy,” wrote Edwin Markham in his poem, Defeat. “Only the soul that knows the mighty grief can know the mighty rapture.”

Getting past the grief of leaving academia

Recognizing that you still have a future, even if it is not what you had hoped, planned, and dreamed about for many years, may be helpful. As Bartram also notes: “You had this life of the mind, and you imagined a future in it, and that’s great. But if it didn’t turn out to be a healthy and stable life for you, you’re not obligated to stay in it.”

It can be helpful to differentiate between mourning and grief. Mourning is the external part of the loss. It’s the actions we take, the rituals and the customs we use to cope with sadness. If there is a ritual that will help you, use it. I’ve heard of people burning books or burying their dissertation or giving the texts you’ve collected to a colleague continuing in the field. These can be beneficial.

Grief, on the other hand, is the internal part of the loss, how we feel. The internal work of grief is a process, a journey. It’s going to take some time.

Sometimes it is helpful to look at the big picture of your life and think about how you have handled other major changes in your life successfully. Think about how you have successfully let things go in the past, whether a relationship, a project or participating in an organization that no longer meets your needs. Notice that you survived the loss, and perhaps even found a sense of relief. Notice there was a point when the loss did not feel so painful. Notice that other things came along for you, once you let go of the old.

Another way to help yourself get past grief is to allow yourself a little time each day to sit in sorrow. The maximum amount of time you want to do this is 15-20 minutes. After that, you are beginning to solidify negative neural networks, and it will get worse instead of better. Most people start with a timer and stop when the time set is reached. Usually, the need to experience the sorrowfully begins to lessen after even a few days of this. It’s far better to acknowledge the sorrow than to stuff it down.

There is no way around the grief of leaving academia, only through it, and the biggest healer truly is time.

My talk on May 4, 2019, “Moving On: Dealing with the emotional aspects of leaving academia,” discussed this, and the many other emotions you may experience.

Next month in Part 2, I’ll tackle dealing with feelings of failure.

 

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