Leaving acadame is not like sabbatical

Sabbaticals don't have grief cycles

Photo by Karl Magnuson on Unsplash

I remember how June used to feel. The weightlessness after turning in grades, the sense of limitless potential. Summers were one of the perks of being a professor. Who else got the better part of three months off every year? It was one way I explained the low pay to myself, as a tradeoff for freedom.

But even better than summer was sabbatical. I had two, and I took the full year each time, and the happy June feeling was magnified a hundredfold. 

Sabbaticals weren’t vacations. I wrote a book each time, published essays, launched a podcast. Both sabbaticals ended with births, my eldest and my youngest, which made them extra special. 

But one of the mistakes I made in transitioning away from academic life was comparing the new flexibility I’d have with those two sabbatical years when I had work to do but was not overwhelmed by it, when I didn’t have to squeeze my workout in before breakfast, when I could ditch the projects and ride fifty miles on the road bike if the weather was nice. In fact, that’s what I told people about our move: it will be like I’m on sabbatical. 

I have no regrets about my choice. If I found myself back in my old office every morning and had to push a button to fly back to this new life, I’d push it every single day. But it’s fair to say that I’m still grieving. 

In my experience, many people are unsettled by a conventionally masculine man speaking honestly about grief or uncertainty. I was raised to hide the kind of thing I’ll write about today. But this newsletter began as a ritual to help me make sense of a major life transition. So I’m going to lean into some uncomfortable truths. And if you are the kind who thinks this sort of thing is better left to a therapist, you may wish to tune back in another time. 

Why leaving academe is not like sabbatical

1. You don’t clean out your office on sabbatical. 

I had a great office. It was a corner space in the oldest building on campus. High ceilings, classy wood paneling. I spent a good share of my sabbatical time there, and it brought the sense of holiday that I always loved while reading in my bedroom as a child, when I could hear the noise of family life beyond the closed door. My office sat beneath a classroom, and I often heard footsteps on the floor above my head between periods, the muffled voice of a colleague teaching, distant laughter. Sometimes bats found their way down through the air vents and flapped frantically around my head until I could shoo them out the window.

It was a home of sorts, decorated with photographs of my children, a few framed shots from my days as a wilderness ranger, and oddities like the Get Out of Hell Free card from the Minnesota Atheists (a great parody of the actual gospel tract). My office felt the same when I was teaching as it did on sabbatical. The only real difference was the closed door. And when sabbatical ended, I was right back at the same desk. 

It felt different on the last day. I vacuumed and dusted, just to be nice, and snapped a few pictures on my phone (this seems to be a rite for many of us). I’d attended two funerals on Facebook Live in that office over the past year, one bizarrely sandwiched between agenda items for a faculty meeting on Zoom, the other just before classes began for my last semester. It felt like that. Final. I thought I’d been grieving before then, but physically walking away was when the real sense of loss set in. 

That’s the thing. Sabbaticals are temporary. Leaving is a frontier that stretches out beyond the horizon.

There may be other offices in my future, but this one represented a hard-fought victory against steep odds. Now I write from a desk in my bedroom that has a better view. But it’s not a work home yet. 

I’ve been researching my family tree in southern Moravia, learning that at least ten ancestors from two villages immigrated to Nebraska during the nineteenth century. One of them was a young bachelor when he left. Two of them were parents who brought their seven children along. I have more money than they did, but that doesn’t mean I feel more settled in my new room. How many of them woke up in Nebraska with the same dissonant feelings: knowing that staying in the Old Country wasn’t really a choice, that they’d do it all over again, but also mourning the village they’d left behind? Many women documented these very feelings in their frontier diaries. But I suspect that the men felt much the same as they walked behind their horses breaking sod on a homestead that was theirs, but still felt foreign to them. In Cather’s My Ántonia, Mr. Shimerda never recovers from precisely this kind of grief. Shimerda was based on a real person, Francis Sadilek, whose suicide grave remains a point of interest in tours of Red Cloud, Nebraska. 

When you leave a profession, you leave a community of people who speak the same language. I’m still learning the language of this new life. 

2. Your projects count when you’re on sabbatical. 

This is a little-understood fact for those outside academe: no one gets handed a sabbatical. One submits a proposal, a list of projects that the college must judge as valuable enough to justify a paid leave, and at the end of the semester or year, a report on these endeavors is due. 

Americans like to think that they can live without caring about what others think, but we evolved to be social creatures, and we do care. It was one thing to be doing work alone in my office that my institution had formally sanctioned and was literally paying me to do. It is quite another to be doing work largely for myself. 

This is what we call in creative writing classes the “so what” question. The “why does anyone care” question. An institution answered part of that question for me on sabbatical. To embrace a writing life outside academe, I must summon the answer all on my own. Sarah Orne Jewett told a young Willa Cather that to write meaningfully “you must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world.” Such is the existential challenge.

I answer the “so what” question with the faith that my writing will be useful to others. Being an independent writer means committing to the work, believing against the silence that it will be heard, feeling alone and doing it anyway. Gillian Welch captures the idea in “Everything is Free.” 

Perhaps that is the secret to life as an independent artist. Sing a little love song to yourself. Male artists typically don’t do that. Mikhail Baryshnikov once described the source of his art as a “divine instability.” A hunger that would not let him rest. I identify more with Baryshnikov, and I think it’s true that many writers are driven by a fundamental dissatisfaction, an itch that every essay and book only partially scratches. But Jewett and Welch might be wiser guides.

3. You get to share all of the teaching ideas you have on sabbatical.

There may be teachers who don’t think of themselves as writers, but the two passions have always bubbled from the same spring for me. To teach literature or creative writing is to bring your life into conversation with others in hope of reciprocation. I suspect that stand-up comedians feel this way, too. One person’s lazy afternoon with their kids at the playground is a comedian’s mine of material for the next audience. And this is not a cynical business of “using” life. It is something more like the child’s instinct to say Hey, look what I found!

My sabbaticals often meant experiments with food, like kombucha and bread making, that I could then pass on to students in a sustainability course. Robin Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass that few of her students had ever been persuaded by jeremiads about raping the earth, but when she asked one group, “What if the Earth loves us back?,” they responded joyfully. What evidence of the Earth’s love could move us more than a warm tomato in our hands or a basket of fresh strawberries? I can share this knowledge with my children. My teacherly instincts feed fatherhood. But all of my students were, for a few hours a week, my own kids. When there is no sabbatical to come back from, no classroom to return to, a broader kinship is lost.

One of my research areas was neuroscience, which was why I picked up David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain during my first sabbatical. I didn’t use Eagleman for anything I ever published, but his cognitive exercises were pure gold for my class on memoir writing. 

One brain game helps us find the blind spot in each eye. Most tests use some version of the  diagram below, with a plus symbol on one side and a dot on the other. To find your blind spot in the right eye, you cover your left eye with one hand, fix your right eye on the plus sign (keep it trained there) and either lift the picture toward your face (if you’re reading on a phone) or lean toward it (if you’re reading on a computer). 

At some point the dot should disappear. And if you bring the image a little closer to your face or lean in a little more, it should reappear. You can do the same thing on the other side by covering your right eye with your hand, training your left eye on the dot, and repeating the earlier steps.

By mistake, the original version I used had some grey shading in the background, and my students discovered something even more surprising. Not only did the dot disappear when it entered their blind spot, the shading filled the space where the dot had been. This is our brain lying to us with the information available to it in the background.

The blind spot test suggests many metaphors for memoir writing. My favorite is an opening scene in Teresa Jordan’s essay, “Bones,” from her memoir Riding the White Horse Home. Jordan describes her father and a hired man trying to inject a sick bull with medicine. The bull rips loose and tramples her father. Jordan watches as her father pulls himself hand-over-hand up the fence, his broken legs dangling uselessly as he falls in a puff of dust outside the corral. The only problem? She was not yet born when the bull broke her father’s legs. She’d heard the story so many times that her memory had placed her there, at the edge of the corral, watching the chaos unfold. 

Eagleman gave me a ready-made writing prompt to accompany Jordan’s essay. Where are the blind spots in your own memory? Where might your memory be lying to you by filling in gaps with available information from family and friends? 

I still see teaching ideas everywhere. Yesterday I photographed a garter snake that lives in a stone wall near our driveway. The kids wanted to know what a garter snake eats, so we looked it up, and a phrase leaped out at me. A garter snake eats anything it can overpower. Slugs, earthworms, maybe even mice. It reminded me of a Gary Larson cartoon featuring two spiders:

From Jason Gardner

Writing is a form of teaching, but there isn’t any replacement for the face-to-face experience of sharing the snake story and connecting it in some creative way to sustainability, literature, or the artistic process. Take risks, like the garter snake. See what scary memories you might be able to overpower by writing through them.

I recently saw this post in a Facebook group devoted to former academics: “I just can't stop caring about teaching. I miss it so, so much. I miss feeling good.” Amen, sister.

It helps to remember that grief is not a linear journey, but something more like a spiral, cycling through clarity, doubt, pain, and relief as we move forward in time. Bearing witness to loss is part of how we heal. Sadness is not a setback or a character flaw or a refusal to move on. It is one truth among other truths, such as these:

• I gave up teaching to invest in family. The world doesn’t place any value on school drop-offs, pickups, and care during sick days or the summer schedule, and most of that work happens without applause. But I made a choice to be here for my kids more than full-time work once allowed me to be. That matters to them. No essay or book will ever love me back. My kids will. My kids do.

• After a little more than five months as a full-time writer, I don’t have much evidence of progress. I’ve been selected as a finalist in three literary contests (here’s one), received a request for the full manuscript of my novel (still pending), and published a feature in The Chronicle of Higher Education. But no one is collecting a sabbatical report on my productivity. That represents both a challenge (the “so what” question) and real freedom.

• I could be more ambitious, put more pressure on myself to crank up my writing output, and jealously guard more linear time for my slow creative process. But I recognize the trap that this thinking represents. Less output, viewed correctly, can be seen as progress away from the all-consuming pursuit of a calling. 

• A quiet center does not come easily after a year that included the deaths of three family members, resignation of a tenured position, real estate dealings, a moving truck, and starting all over with a new work life. It is okay to still feel unmoored after a transition as significant as that. It is okay to see the transition as ongoing and incomplete.

• Here’s the thing: We don’t put ourselves together the same way after grief breaks us apart. Nearly everyone who has shared their story of leaving academe with me has felt intense sorrow. One woman said she spent the summer after her resignation holding down the couch with her dog, that it took ten years for her to really find her way back to feeling purposeful. A man with hundreds of publications who once held an endowed chair told me that retiring early made him feel like a nobody. This isn’t narcissism or self-pity. It is grief. It is a natural emotional cycle during retirement, and resigning earlier than anticipated just makes it more acute. 

Finally, this newsletter is expressly devoted to the “messy middle” of my journey. I’m trying not to play the numbers game, but Substack analytics tell me that each post reaches a few hundred people. Your comments and private messages tell me that what I’ve written about my life has helped you understand your own. That is progress. That can be a strong foundation.