A Sadness That Holds Hope for Joy
Today’s essay is part of a new series on recovery that includes me,
, , , , and . Each of us will wrestle this week with what recovery means to us and how our life experiences shape that definition.—
I used to teach in an Iowa town that Bill Bryson said was “as tranquil as a double dose of Valium.” That was close to the mark. Pretty much everything I hated about it as a single person — the cuteness, the tidiness — I loved as a parent. There were Dutch bakeries, holiday carriage rides, even a craft beer pub all within a five-minute stroll. And I had a six-block commute to work.
But there was trouble in paradise.
One day I locked my bike outside my office and logged on to my computer, intending to open the budget for the first-year seminar I was directing. I was planning a workshop and wanted to calculate how much I could offer my colleagues in stipends. But the budget had disappeared. I kept scanning my dashboard, thinking I’d mixed something up, removed a widget maybe? But finally the truth sank in. I was still responsible for training 30 faculty and developing curriculum for 500+ students, but I no longer had access to the funds for the program. And no one had thought to tell me. It felt like being locked out of my own office.
This was not a mistake. A decision had been made (and I use the passive voice intentionally to mask the “doer,” since I still don’t know who it was) to pool resources for several programs in one fund that an associate dean would monitor. As a result, my program had no guaranteed funds at all. Each expense required a separate request.
At the height of the madness, when I was trying to book a distinguished artist who we’d agreed to reimburse for her travel, I had to ask her to email screenshots of airfare, which I then relayed to the deanlet for approval (not knowing, myself, what the hard limit was). The approval came several hours later, and I told the artist to please proceed. But I could tell from her response that the joy from our earlier correspondence had cooled. And, truth be told, I was beginning to feel the same way about my work.
The budget switcheroo made me angry. It was insulting to have been left out of the loop. But I could have forgiven that oversight if anyone had acknowledged it — and if the new system came with a sensible rationale. Instead, it seemed designed to minimize spending by obstructing access. The new budget also represented a shift in power, concentrating more authority in administration and stripping faculty leaders of agency. But no one seemed capable of admitting either. And I saw this story repeated over and over again with strategic planning, with accreditation review, with shared governance, and more.
I trace my identity as a recovering academic to that memory, because it was the first time I began to doubt my profession and myself as a result. Throughout the process of leaving academe and rebuilding my life on the other side, I’ve often wondered if I was overreacting, if things were not as bad as they seemed to me. Anger is usually a good occasion to check in with yourself, to see if you’re distorting reality, refusing to listen, or simply defending yourself out of hurt. But two years later I do not look back, as so many who have battled addiction do, and marvel at how wrong I was and how obvious it was to everyone but me. Instead, recovery means trusting myself as a reliable witness to my own life. What felt wrong was truly wrong. My gut was telling the truth.
Why “The Recovering Academic”?
When I launched
, I knew there would be some chatter about whether the title was meant to be glib or serious. In fact it was meant to be both.The academic is sometimes caricatured as an obsessive, a hound who just can’t let go of the knowledge bone, worrying reams of data, sniffing through the archives, panting the night away in the lab. There’s enough truth in that image to get a chuckle whenever I introduce myself as a recovering academic. But the stereotype hides deeper tales of suffering, of how far academic work can pull us from the “why” that brought us to the profession to begin with, how we blame ourselves for the doubts when they creep in, how we struggle with shame and a feeling of failure when we leave, even if leaving was our own choice, even if it felt like the only choice left.
So my recovery alludes not to addiction or treatment, but to bereavement — to a loss that broke me and sent me careening into grief. If this series is about anything, it is about my attempt to reassemble a self on the other side of that mourning.
An important first step in my recovery, and one I still emphasize publicly, was the knowledge that I was not alone. Not a week goes by that I don’t hear from readers or new LinkedIn contacts thanking me for my honesty. It’s been a chorus of voices who have suffered from isolation, intimidation, and guilt. I thought I was the only one. Everyone said I was crazy for leaving. My mentor shunned me when I quit. Thank God I wasn’t making it up.
I had a line out the door every time I recruited sources for a new Chronicle piece. These weren’t faculty who had been laid off or denied the tenure track, they were high-performing professionals, award-winning scholars and teachers whose faith in higher education had faltered. The most troubling pattern? Most were idealists, the ones who had happily traded religious belief for vocational awe, who fell headlong for research and teaching only to discover that their institutions didn’t love them back in that way.
This is why
compares her own resignation to getting a divorce, a major rupture that required a “conscious uncoupling.” claims that leaving academe restored her mental health. Amanda Welch, Cleyde Helena, and Ian Street produced a podcast for recovering academics before I launched my series. And Gabrielle Filip-Crawford chose the same name for a support network on Slack.I need these reminders that the grief I felt so keenly last year was not only real, but legitimate. Hundreds, maybe thousands of others have walked the same road. Part of that mourning has meant accepting that I can no longer count on my degrees, my publication history, or my record of leadership to open other opportunities. Almost everything that comes next must be new. But one sign of recovery is trusting my instincts and my discernment for past choices and for those yet to come.
Was it wrong from the start?
I thought of these things when I carried a basket out to the garden before the first frost. It was nearly a year to the date that I’d begun building a deer fence that I called a DIY cure for academe. There’s always something sad about the last harvest of the year, even if it overlaps with garlic planting, and it brought Percy Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” to mind, where a traveler happens upon a ruined statue with the inscription, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Shelley’s poem is a reminder that everything crumbles in the end, the way every garden must surrender to frost. So I was tempted to think of my work in that way. How long did Steve Jobs’s dent in the universe last? Who is even talking about him anymore? And if that is true, how much less significant the sixteen years I spent pouring heart and soul into the classroom must be.
But then I remembered Jack Gilbert’s poem “Failing and Flying,” which begins with the unforgettable line: “Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.” Gilbert pushes back at those who say, when a relationship falters, that anyone could have seen it coming, that failure was baked in from the start. No, he says — there’s always a side of love that was real. I like his poem as a way of thinking about my academic life because, for a significant portion of it, I flew.
I had excellent mentors in graduate school, where I made friends that remain close to this day. Sure, I got sucked into the numbers game with publications, weathered a stressful first year on the job market, and took a job in a region that I would not have chosen otherwise. But the college that hired me was much like the one I attended. The small town recalled my Montana community. I wasn’t invisible there. I even truthfully described my position as a dream job, not because it paid well, but because it offered me a chance to be my full self. No need to carve out a research niche — I could teach both halves of the American literature survey, medical humanities, creative writing, sustainability, podcasting, even a senior seminar on Willa Cather that culminated in a road trip to her Nebraska hometown.
These are many of the reasons why I grieved the transition out of academe so hard. But I also know that the air around the classroom soured during my final years, and that I perceived that shift accurately. And so both halves of my academic life, like both sides of the Icarus tale, are equally true. And I might say, as Gilbert does of Icarus, that I was not “failing as [I] fell,” that I was not falling at all, that leaving academe represented the “end of [my] triumph.”
Yet I cannot claim Gilbert’s view alone. It was hard to pick those last peppers, to pull out the frozen stalks a week later, to shut the gate on the year. It brought back the feeling of leaving my office on the last day, when I had an impulse to snap a photo or two to prove I’d really been there.
The last harvest also felt heavier this year because I am nearing the end of a divorce. I won’t be planting more garlic or anything else in those beds that I built. This is another end, another goodbye. But that’s not all it is. My marriage, like my academic career, saw many happy years and gave me the gift of fatherhood. None of that was in vain, even if it couldn’t be saved.
That reminder also helps me see that I did not build my garden for nothing. I built it as an expression of hope, a ceremony of home making, a breathing out of my core beliefs. And it gave me back a beautiful harvest. Fifty pounds of potatoes, enough cucumbers for many quarts of pickles, a year’s worth of tomato salsa, peppers galore, world-class squash, kale, carrots, beets, and more.
Some say that you never recover from grief. Never put yourself back together in the same way again. But I find recovery in a more measured view. For now it is sadness that holds hope for joy. One day it will be happiness that saves space for sorrow. Shelley and Gilbert must come together, today and tomorrow.
I walked away from academe, but that’s not all I did. I am a recovering academic and a divorcé, but that is not all that I am or all that I ever will be.
I think that in some respects it's not that you left academe but that the academe you went into left you.
I’m so sorry to hear about your divorce. But then, as someone who went through a similar journey (and still am in many ways), I’m not sorry--I’m glad that you’re spreading your wings, broken though they may feel. From one recovering academic (and divorcée) to another. Cheers. 🥃