When I named our blog Mama Nervosa, I thought it was sort of ha-ha funny. Oh, I’m so neurotic! It’s so amusing! But time has shown that it was a rather uncannily accurate descriptor, at least for me (maybe not as much for Jen). Obviously, a lot of my writing, especially around quitting grad school, has dealt with dark and intense emotions. And sometimes, my writing about motherhood veers towards the anxious, confused, or unhappy. Since day one, I’ve wanted to represent myself and my reality in a frank and hopefully funny way, although it’s not as funny as I wanted it to be.
Thing is, this has been a tough six months for me. Quitting grad school is incredibly difficult, as we have documented, and I have struggled with it. But really, it’s more than that: quitting grad school shook me to my core, and now it’s bringing up a bunch of really messy, dark stuff that’s been dormant, too. I’m now dealing with deeper, more longterm problems that have been on hold or deferred or ignored while I was in grad school. The last 2-3 months have been extremely hard for me, emotionally, even though on the surface everything worked out fairly well (I have a good job and necessary income: things could be so much worse). But I liken it to lifting up a rock and peering at all the gross stuff beneath. Or cleaning a room that seems rather messy but then you get in there and realize, oh shit, this is going to take me all day. The depression and unhappiness that led me to quit grad school is just the tip of the iceberg. The confusion and identity shifts that quitting brought on go way deeper than just the vocation I was aiming for, or the kind of student I wanted to be.
JC has written eloquently about the mental health problems that plague graduate students. Grad school is a breeding ground for depression, hopelessness, and disillusionment, and I certainly suffered from all of those problems as a student. But I think that even beyond the obvious stressors, the culture of graduate school sort of arrests our development and growth. We end up trading water in a stage of life that’s not quite adulthood, but beyond adolescence. The continuous cycle of renewal — a new school year, a new job market season, a new semester, a new round of courses — can (at least for me, I imagine for many) act as a feedback loop which it’s very hard to break out of or think beyond. The endless chance of renewal makes it so much easier to wait and see and defer dealing with a problem. I’m unhappy in school, but maybe next semester will be better. I hate coursework, but let’s see if getting out of it makes me feel better. I no longer love this field, but this other one over here is really exciting and I can move in that direction.
Thus, you never deal with the problems of right now. You can deny, deny, deny, until you break down and quit. You can be terribly unhappy but certain that a solution is right around the corner. It’s so alluring to stay in that world because then you don’t have to face the fears and horrible outside world. I know because I lived that, over and over again. Fear kept me in school. Certainly, the grad school culture of perpetual hope and refusal to discuss/acknowledge anything negative or weak or worrying encouraged me to avoid pain and avoid dealing with problems in the same way it encouraged me to go into deeper and deeper financial debt.
I think that I expected quitting would break that cycle and that stepping into the light of the real world would fix me. I mean, I knew it would be a tough transition, but I truly believed finding a paying job would fix me in a certain way. That the benefits of real life, money, time, etc — all the things denied to me in grad school — would overwhelm the sadness and uncertainty. That I wouldn’t be sad anymore.
But now I am not only dealing with the fallout from quitting, I’m dealing with a backlog of personal issues that got denied and deferred for most of my twenties. I’m dealing with my psychological debt, in a way: suddenly facing a huge payoff because I kept borrowing more time. I’m dealing with immense darkness and feeling awful. I’m spending a lot of time meeting with psychiatrists and therapists. (I’m so deeply relieved that I have health insurance and the means to pursue these options.)
I’ve wrestled with sharing this because I am afraid that people will be like fuck that! I’m staying in grad school! I still think quitting was the right thing to do. I’m glad I have a job. I’m glad I’m not still stuck in that cycle of magical thinking. But I want to be honest with you and everyone about the toll grad school may continue to take on us, long after we leave. Anyone who’s ever been in a 12 step program or faced dealing with some major trauma knows that you reach a point where you can’t go on living this way anymore, but you are also terrified to try to live without the things you’ve been clinging to. It becomes both impossible and necessary to change yourself completely. I’m standing on that precipice right now. The only thing I know for sure, from past experience, is that hope is on the other side. I’d rather be struggling towards hope than running in the opposite direction. I had to quit to get this point.
So, quitting might not always be pretty, but I still think it’s better.
Thank you so, so, so much for this post, Lauren! Seriously…I am getting a little misty-eyed with gratitude.
I have been struggling to pen a similar post and I haven’t gotten it out yet for much the same reasons you list–a fear that I might discourage people from quitting grad school.
Recently, I’ve felt like a bit of a failure in the post-ac blogosphere…everyone else who has jobs–you, JC, recent PhD, Jet, etc–all seem to have landed on your feet so well. You all seem to have your shit together. And I feel like my blog is rapidly becoming the “quit grad school and make your life suck more/be a failure” blog, since I hate SAP so much. I have been REALLY happy to hear about all your well-deserved successes but have also felt like a failure/a twinge of jealousy sometimes for still struggling with a sucky non-ac job, depression, anxiety, and a HUGE identity shitstorm.
Thanks for reminding me I’m not alone.
You’re definitely not a failure. In fact, I think your experience is far more common than mine or JC’s. I think a lot of people do some flailing after quitting. I’m doing plenty flailing myself, just within the confines of a job I mostly like. As usual, we academics are mistaking jobs for security/certainty/identity. KWIM? That doesn’t go away when we quit or become employed. I had a reader with a PhD, TT faculty positing, in a desirable location email me and say that she is going through the same intense turmoil as well, in her first year out of school.
“I think a lot of people do some flailing after quitting. I’m doing plenty flailing myself, just within the confines of a job I mostly like.”
And I flail around as well. I flailed a LOT when I first left … but as it turned out, I had a job that I could just flail into and hunker down in until the flailing passed and I could clearly think about what I really wanted to do next. It’s was just dumb luck that I already had a job that I could just fall into for the time being. But I don’t want anyone to think that I haven’t been doing the mental gymnastics too. Hell, I think I might be doing them a little more because I didn’t actually go out and look for a *career.* What kind of inspirational postacademic am I if I just turned and hopped into the “safe job” I already have?
And no, I don’t hate my job. It’s fine. But I’m still doing a LOT of mental flailing and thinking and angst-ing over what comes next. Don’t worry.
Thanks, JC. You are the post-ac Yoda.
O yes yes yes, thank you so much for this post. I’m also dealing with the psychological fallout of leaving while trying to cobble together my sanity in what I (mistakenly) thought would be validating, non-academic work.
A giant chunk of my identity/aspirations is gone and I’m pretty much running on grief.
Thank you — I’m glad this resonated with you. I hope you’re talking to someone about it. It does seem to help. But yeah, it’s really hard.
I am glad you are writing about this, and more importantly, I am proud of you for facing these things head-on. I think you are pretty amazing, IMHO.
PS: Don’t forget I’m only a text away if you want to chat.
I’ve been thinking about you a lot. I was laying in bed with Holly at the ass-crack of dawn saying to myself, “I miss Steph!!”
You are so fucking brave, Lauren. I feel so incredibly lucky to have met you, and to have the honor of sharing this blogging space with you.
On a much lighter note: my writing, and perhaps also my life, is not as funny as I would like it to be. And on terrible mornings, I have found that cranking up the Fresh Beats genuinely helps.
I’ve been looking for a friend like you!
I just came across a reference to your post in Currer Bell’s recent post. I really identify with the lengthy process of working through some of the left over baggage of the post Grad School experience. I have a whole list of issues that are still sitting dormant and that I’m hoping I can come to terms with somehow, either through reading other post-ac blogs and sharing some of my own experiences on my Blog. What’s kind of strange for me is that part of my alt-ac job actually involves a sort of ‘positive’ disclosure of my experience as a PhD student at the university where I work now, as I am in a role where I am hired to engage with the postgrad community across faculties and implement various data collection means of discovering what they are feeling about their experience as postgrad students! A large part of me really wants to shout out, hey I wouldn’t blame you if you changed your mind now and ran off before they get your tuition fees and steel your heart and soul. But I’m supposed to find ways of keeping them there, knowing very well that some of them would be better off doing something else. And every time I reveal that I was an ex-PhD student I’m always wondering in the back of my mind whether my listener is judging me as PhD failure. It will help to find other alt-acs who are achieving good things in their new roles are are highly respected for that – perhaps they can help give us the confidence to see that we have great potential too. Hang in their Lauren.
Thanks, Jet. That sounds like a really strange and interesting position to be in. I’ll have to read more!
lauren, thanks so much for writing this. the precipice rings so true… and taking the time/ space/ thought to name and face your psychological debt. your writing is always real. and that is a gift.
Thx, Marie!
Thank you for this – what an honest description of the really shitty, OTHER side of being a quitta. While we know it was/is the right decision, it certainly doesn’t mean life is all rainbows and unicorns. I also feel like I’m in this place, although I know I’m putting off the mental work of actually thinking about all this because I’m pregnant with no. 2 and so am focusing (obsessing) on that right now. I do think about the fact that I’ll need to face all of this someday… and maybe putting it off isn’t the best idea, but quitting is still so fresh for me, I don’t think I’m ready to deal yet.
Anyway, thank you for your writing and again, for this blog. I’ve said it before but I just can’t tell you how awesome it was to find it!
I am so grateful that you wrote this post! Seriously. This has been on my mind. I appreciate your blog so much – it was really a breath of fresh air when I was deciding to leave, and it still is.
And congrats on the job! The last time I was around here you were still looking so I’m really happy to see you found one.
I recently (after I decided to quit recently) found out that I’m pregnant (which was quite the surprise, but I am also happy about it) and found myself thinking of you. I am now appreciating your motherhood posts as well, haha!
Thank you so much, and congratulations! Surprise second babies are lovely. Holly was a surprise, too!
Oh, wait, is this your first? Well, regardless — congrats!
It is my first! And thank you
This post really resonated with me as well. I only spent 2 months in a MSW program before I quit. For some reason, I thought that I would come out emotionally unscathed. Instead, I am facing total uncertainty about what I want to do and a whopping amount of self-esteem issues. It’s draining! Thank you for this post- knowing that I am not alone in this is wonderful!
Hi Lauren,
Sorry to hear you went through all this. I can sympathize with it so much. As I plan to write on more, academic culture can be like a religion and cult in some serious ways. When you’re in it, you’ve got this social community with its own rich internal value system, lingo, status channels, local celebrities, you feel like you’re doing such important work, that you’re ambitiously building this great, esteemed future for yourself in which you will be engaged in important, highly dignified, highly noble work, etc. Then you leave because you find out how stacked the odds are for getting where you want to be, how few desirable Plan Bs there are, etc. But it’s tough to leave because you’ve been a high achiever all your life and to leave would mean that you didnt succeed at the thing you’d always kicked ass at, that you’d have to start from the bottom of some other ladder – and, for the first time in your life – be “behind” rather than ambitiously ahead. You’d have to leave the academic culture that you had gotten incredibly accustomed to and respected so much and still, for the most part, do continue to respect a lot. You know you’ll deeply miss a lot about academic culture – the interesting, ambitious, people who are so intellectually inclined, idealistic, motivated to advance knowledge, etc. You know that you’ll have to enter into another culture which you probably have been in large part an outsider to for a while – in fact, in many ways, if you’ve never worked full-time as an adult, it might be like entering it for the first time. You may find that many of your biggest accomplishments are not particularly cared about outside of your field, so in a way you go from having a fairly stacked resume to having one that is not that stacked at all. You can feel like “whoa, did I just go from being ahead of the curve to getting left behind by society? what the fuck just happened here?!!” You have to wonder if and how you had made a big mistake years ago deciding to take the grad path and might be annoyed at yourself for not having seen things for what they were earlier. …
Ron, yes, we’ve all been on the guilt treadmill, haven’t we?