Dear Academia, I Quit

Wait, everyone always implied. Wait till tenure, wait till menopause, then you will be free. I didn’t want to wait to be happy.

I’ve been sitting on the hideous orange carpet for hours, the scent of cardboard and dust tickling my nose. The stuff I’ve kept says a lot about who I am and who I wanted to be.

My mom refers to this box as my school treasures. What used to be a binder has erupted into an unbound collection of pockets and prompts charting my growth from kindergarten to college. Honors, praise from teachers, my best essays . . . I comb through the yellowed keepsakes thinking of how much I enjoyed being good at school. I can’t part with this stuff, even at thirty-seven, even after everything. Each year features a series of checkboxes to record what I wanted to become as an adult. I’d either check off six out of the ten professions or add my own checkboxes to the list. Once, I’d even added “happy” in clumsy block letters—a lonely adjective in a sea of nouns. I giggle when I read my answer to the prompt My ambition is_____: “to figure out what my ambition is.”

Sometime in Grade 4, I decided that one of my ambitions was to become a scientist. I’d lug my grandmother’s encyclopedias to class in my backpack and ask my teacher for free time to do my independent research on Jupiter’s moons. When the adults I knew couldn’t answer my questions, I’d send letters to the authors of my favorite science books. I found a strange solace in studying. I traded family gatherings and weddings for my color-coded highlights and cue cards. I befriended my quirky brain, observing the way it learned and feeding it accordingly.

I welcomed the identity I was filling into. As the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants who had left everything overseas except for their values and traditions, I was brought up knowing that making something of myself meant getting far in my education. In university, I somehow cracked the secret scholarship code, winning more awards than I could even accept, quietly repaying my grandparents’ sacrifices.

Academia felt like a natural choice. I dove headfirst into my PhD without thinking much about my end goal. I never saw myself as a professor, but I’d worry about that later. I was fascinated by the brain and language. I had bold ideas for research that had never been done about how the brain learns, uses, and forgets languages, and how this might differ in adults compared to children. My supervisor and I were known internationally for the work we were doing. There were so many mysteries in this new field we were forging, I could easily fill a whole career.

I loved it. What a privilege it was to study what I found interesting, to spend my days asking questions and digging for answers. My ten-year-old self had manifested this reality and had equipped me with the self-discipline to tackle it. It was such a triumph when something we had a clever hunch about went right, when our findings told an unexpected story that explained a sliver of human behavior. When I wasn’t in the lab or writing articles at my dining room table, I was traveling restlessly, presenting at conferences and collaborating with other researchers as a visiting fellow. I can still feel that passion, that bubbling excitement at the thought of a new what-if or how-come, that thrill at the sight of my supervisor’s grin when my brain was sharp and unstoppable.

I also hated it. My work expanded like a gas, seeping into every fissure. There was always more I should do, even when I was done. I was never in control of my own time, which was unfortunate since time was the currency that determined our success and self-worth. Timelines were constantly revised. Waiting for feedback put progress on hold for months and, when it finally came, it upended everything in its path. “You’re still doing your PhD?” began to sound suspiciously like, “Still no kids?” I put myself second without realizing I did. I’d forgo bathroom breaks, eat when I thought of it, and swap sleep for a few extra paragraphs. I’d skip the workshops I had paid to attend and sit in the lobby scrambling to finish my own talk because my supervisor had asked for a last-minute overhaul just when I’d managed to commit my slides to memory. “No” simply didn’t fly in academia. We were expected to roll with it, for the good of this noble profession. Some of my peers were making forty dollars a day while their work spilled over into evenings and weekends. Balance was an illusion. Open-ended meetings made any supper plans tentative. Vacation was an intention at best; despite booked flights and scheduled autoresponders, my thesis weaseled its way in, dissolving my peace. It didn’t matter that research was only one of my countless interests. The pie chart was meant to have only one color.

I guess I’d consented to it. During my interview, my supervisor had asked, “Are you a nine-to-five person?” and I’d answered something like, “I believe in getting things done when they need to get done.” Did it have to be this way, so all-encompassing? Was it toxic? I asked my journal once, as I sat by the sea while my peers were inside networking through their lunch break. To ask it aloud would have been ungrateful.

It didn’t matter that research was only one of my countless interests. The pie chart was meant to have only one color.

“What do you do for a living?” was the first question I heard at every doctor’s office, though I would have much preferred, “How are you feeling?” Before I even understood what exactly had been causing me unrelenting abdominal pain, I learned that endometriosis is nicknamed “the career woman’s disease.” In their view, I fueled the illness by not wanting kids. The bad cells proliferated because my sense of purpose stemmed from my brain instead of my uterus. I kept the beast hidden and plowed on, trying to cheat time before it cheated me. No one knew the emails I replied to in the thick of the night were sent from the bathroom floor or that most of my thesis was written on morphine. But the clock was hard to shake; it was nearly out of ticks. “Better freeze your eggs before it’s too late,” doctors urged. The values that should have been high were near zero, and the ones that should have been low were off the charts. Before long, I’d consented to daily injections and to a new slew of unmanageable symptoms. When I showed up for a daylong meeting at my supervisor’s house with an injector pen that needed to be refrigerated and a belly so bloated I could barely untie my shoes, I had to confess. “We’ll stop the clock,” he said, getting the director to grant me a short sick leave. In our department, though, stopping the clock was merely a formality; though the PhD scoreboard was officially frozen, we were still expected to make progress. I knew academia was not for the fainthearted, but it hurt to discover it was maybe also not for the neurodiverse or the chronically ill. Soon, the disease I’d kept so well concealed had me unraveling right before people’s eyes. Now peppered between the As on my transcript were ugly Ws—withdrawals. I burst into tears in class more than once, missed flights to conferences, and walked out on my own talks to check myself in to ERs, leaving my supervisor to conjure up excuses for me. I almost wouldn’t graduate. I almost wouldn’t survive.

Immediately after I hobbled over the finish line, they all asked, “So, what’s next?” Most of my peers had lined up postdocs before they’d even defended. All I wanted to do was catch my breath. Hadn’t I finally earned rest? I watched my friends change countries and even change research topics, collecting postdoc after postdoc in college towns we couldn’t point to on a map and chasing tenure an ocean apart from their spouses and kids. The expectation of sacrifice clearly didn’t stop at the PhD. I never would have imagined it to be difficult to find work after everything we’d achieved. That wasn’t in the leaflet, not even in fine print. My husband and I had done our fair share of long distance. My surgeon had taken me seventeen years to find. I was different from my grandparents, unwilling to limit my dreams to one suitcase. If I was going to start from scratch in a white-walled studio with two burners and two pots, working nights and weekends with my jaw seized from a storm of stress and hormones, then I at least wanted to further my specialization and . . . to earn more. But it was taboo to want to earn more. It was taboo to want anything better than what you could get.

When I wanted to hold out for my ideal position or create my own job with external funding, my professors chided me for being inflexible in requiring work to suit my “various constraints.” But my pickiness was protective. I didn’t want to hustle to eventually do what I wanted. That’s what we were expected to do because that’s what they had done. Wait, everyone always implied. Wait till tenure, wait till menopause, then you will be free. I didn’t want to wait to be happy.

I knew academia was not for the fainthearted, but it hurt to discover it was maybe also not for the neurodiverse or the chronically ill.

I took a gamble and stuck to my guns, applying for a coveted fellowship that I could take to any institution. Maybe, for once, I was cocky: With my track record for funding, I thought I could win. And I did win. Except, I didn’t. Although I was ranked among the top in the country, safely within the bracket that would be granted the funding, I was skipped and placed on an alternate list while applicants with lower scores were funded because of a quota on my chosen institution. Red tape had cost me. A year of stoppage time was added to the clock until I could apply again. I felt like a benched Olympic athlete who had to wait for the next games, hoping they’d be just as fit—or even fitter—and that endorsers would still believe in them by then.

I spent the year nurturing myself back to life. I found ways to fill my days while leaving very wide margins. I turned up the volume on my other passions and let them take up space. My brain couldn’t assimilate anything new in science; it was like pouring a kettle of water into a bowl that was already full to the brim. But my creativity was stirring awake. I took branding courses to grow the photography shop I had launched as a hobby during my PhD and watched myself blossom into an entrepreneur. When my business coach suggested I price my artwork according to what I wanted to earn to have my ideal lifestyle, I felt my reality turn on its head.

Every day, I chose myself. I asked myself what I needed and tried to honor that. I journaled. I planted. I gave myself permission to flounder. I swore at my body, but I also teased it and celebrated its progress. I worked on straightening a posture molded by decades of books and chronic pain. I challenged myself to leave emails unanswered. I heard myself say no. I finally stood up to doctors who had it wrong. I relearned to breathe and realized I’d never known how. I worked on undoing the knot I was tangled into, careful not to snap at the kinked bits. I relished the seasons and noticed I could cheat time by slowing down rather than ripping through it. I let myself feel it all without worrying that I was feeling too much. I was bravery and fear, and every increment in between. My boundaries created tension with those who had never seen me draw them, but I drew them anyway. I didn’t want anyone to have limitless access to me but me.

When I applied for the fellowship again, my scores were halved, though my materials were stronger. This cohort was exceptionally stellar, they said when I inquired, and reviewers were forced to assign candidates to piles at their discretion. I didn’t do enough to secure my spot in the right pile. I was calibrated against others who had no gap on their CV. I spent the next months applying for opportunities and having my inadequacies haunt me each time. I bit my lip and filled out the “special circumstances” section to justify why so much time had elapsed since graduation but was told that a medical leave, unlike a parental leave, was not an acceptable delay. I wrote letters to argue that these practices and quotas were discriminatory. The funding guidelines were later revised and their definition of “career interruption” was expanded to include illness. But I stopped applying. I had been building a different life to bide my time, until that life became what I wanted.

Still, it was difficult to explain to others. Who are we, if not what we do? “I just finished my PhD,” I said for a while, until the “just” was a lie. It wasn’t enough, anyway—you needed an affiliation. When I said I was a travel photographer, a writer, or an entrepreneur, they were confused. “But didn’t you do a PhD?” My elevator speech had gotten too long. My grandmothers’ opinions were mapped on their foreheads; they couldn’t understand people who did not work in their field, as though they’d failed at what they’d sought to accomplish. A straight line is meant to be drawn between what we study, where we work, and who we are. “It’s a shame,” they’d say, in the same tone they used to describe divorced or childless couples. “After all that!” Was it better to stay in an unhealthy situation simply because you invested too much to walk away? What if I stated cause and effect: “I didn’t get funding, so here we are.” What if I answered honestly: “My health is my full-time job right now.” No, there was stigma in that too. I couldn’t talk about the uterus when I’d been trained to talk about the brain.

My academic colleagues weren’t thrilled either. I’d seen the way they talked about those who left academia, with a hint of contempt punctuating their sentences. “So, this is what you do now?” they’d ask me. “I hope you don’t quit; you’re so gifted. People invested in you!” But I’d repaid my investments; I’d published prolifically and given more of my time than you’d ever be expected to give a former employer. “Good that you have a backup plan,” said the few who acknowledged the reality of academia, that there are more PhDs than positions and that pay and benefits are subpar. I didn’t know, then, that the system is in crisis, that there is a mass exodus to industry, that a scholar’s sacrifice is a dying art form. Many thought I took the easy way out, and I let them think it. I knew there was nothing easy about entrepreneurship, or about taking an eraser to your dreams and writing over the faint traces.

Much of the vernacular in academia has to do with a track. Getting into a PhD with a master’s puts you on the “fast track.” The conventional goal is to strive for a “tenure track.” The purpose of a track is its destination. A train doesn’t detour. But I defected. I annoyed our never-give-up society, where things are not worth doing at all unless you do them completely, forever.

The strange thing about grief is that it can ride on the same moment as joy and even be self-inflicted. Soon after quitting academia, I launched my second business and crafted a job as multidisciplinary as I am. I consult on projects in science, business, and health, tapping into the interests and skills I’ve collected like seashells. I use my PhD training every day—from critical thinking to my aptitude with spreadsheets. Within a year, I’d repaid my daunting medical debt and left the postdoc salary behind. My “inflexible” terms keep me thriving between surgeries. I wake up motivated and crawl into bed at peace, stimulated by my diverse work and in control of my yeses and nos. But there’s a mournfulness in this redefinition of success. It’s not easy to disentangle others’ disappointment from my own, to know whether to blame the institution or myself. For a while, I’d retort that academia left me. I felt betrayed by the system I’d poured myself into since my teens, betrayed by its barriers and cookie-cutter ways. Somewhere not so deep, the parallel universe still stings. There’s an unease in going through a box of school treasures and feeling a severed link with that fragment of myself.

For a long time, I chalked it up to yet another bullet point on the long list of what endometriosis had cost me. Self-acceptance was a long road, longer than the acceptance I sought from others. I had to learn to be proud of how far I’d come without needing to go any further. I had to recognize that this facet of my identity had simply transformed into something new.

I didn’t give up. I chose better: I drew my own checkbox.