by Katie Cox
In the second year of my PhD, I was in despair. My family was in crisis, I had just spent a horrible few months navigating a hostile rental market on a PhD stipend, and I was starting to wonder if I’d started my PhD for the wrong reasons. Of course I hadn’t written anything in months, because my thesis seemed to be 70% thorny problems, 20% waffle, and maybe 10% useful insights (if I was feeling generous to myself). At the end of a disastrous first semester of teaching, I was exhausted and paralyzed. Moving forward seemed impossible, and going back or sideways felt like an admission of deep personal failure.
This is a common experience in the PhD, although at the time I didn’t believe that the common diagnosis applied to me. It was easy to accept that other people were simply suffering from imposter syndrome. But in my distorted internal world, the diagnosis just didn’t ring true. All the encouraging words in the world could not shake my belief that I simply wasn’t good enough to succeed.
Then Lauren suggested I quit. It was a gut punch. She was my oldest friend and staunchest supporter, the person who first got excited about my research plans. I got quite defensive, because of course I couldn’t quit – could I?
It was the best thing she could have said to me.
It’s counterintuitive, but taking that suggestion seriously helped me reaffirm my commitment to finishing the PhD. It helped me to reframe staying in academia as a choice, not an obligation, and to find alternative futures, careers and callings that I would be happy with. After doing that work, it was easier for me to write a stronger thesis and get it done faster. I’m not exaggerating when I say that considering quitting the PhD has given me a healthier approach to life in general.
Graduating in the exceptionally challenging atmosphere of 2020, I’ve found myself called back to these questions. Should I stay in academia and try to cling onto the crumbling cliff face, or should I cut my losses? Answering that question is deeply personal, of course. But I believe that to preserve (or regain) some sense of autonomy and power over our lives, it’s important to leave all-or-nothing thinking behind and become better acquainted with all the options open to us – no matter how uncomfortable they might feel.
Optimism and its discontents
It seems trivial now, in 2020, but that day is seared into my memory. We sat at a sunny table in our favourite cafe, where we had inhaled endless teas and sandwiches over study sessions as undergrads, where long ago the owner tested my claim to Italian heritage by deliberately mispronouncing ‘gnocchi’. Quit academia. Leave it all behind. A cold sensation twisted in my belly; the old fears rising up. But there was a new fear there too, something I couldn’t articulate yet.
Fear is rife in academic quit lit. When I went home, I read an article or two, hesitantly at first, and then devoured everything I could find. Some of it didn’t resonate with me, for which I count myself extremely lucky. My department and primary supervisor are lovely, helpful people, which was not the experience of many people writing about their exit from academia (and if this is your problem, get support as quickly as you can). But the sense of loss and disappointment, especially the fear of losing an identity, felt very real.
What I didn’t immediately realise was that my problem wasn’t just fear, it was also optimism.
It was my own research that opened the door. I study popular stories about coping with crisis (think Iron Man). My research was premised on the idea that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves shape the way we see ourselves, and what we think is possible for us. But we can become invested in these stories even when they don’t actually work for us.
If you do critical theory or affect theory, you might be familiar with Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism. For Berlant, optimism doesn’t necessarily mean positivity; it just means expectation. We have an optimistic attachment to something (whether it’s a job, a belief, or a goal) when it seems to promise us something we deeply desire or need. You might expect intellectual fulfilment from a career in academia, for example. In Berlant’s terms, our fantasy provides us with the ‘conditions of possibility’ for the kind of life or identity that we want. Optimism turns cruel when we can’t give up the fantasy, even if it actively prevents us from achieving what we want from it.
Quit lit deals with this exact problem. When the quitter realises that the toxic power structures and perverse incentives of academic culture are barring them from the life that academia promises, they often have to work hard to disentangle their sense of self from the academic career they’ve imagined. Like any kind of creative or generative work, academic work is often also identity work.
Part of the problem is, I think, that we have similar kinds of expectations invested in quitting.
If you’ve ever had these thoughts, you’ll know what I mean:
If I quit, people will be disappointed in me.
If I quit, I will have wasted my supervisor’s time and my own.
If I quit, I’ll have to get a dreadful office job and I’ll never have a satisfying life.
For many analytical people, it’s second nature to anticipate the possible outcomes of our decisions. Often, though, these forecasts crystallise into narratives that come to seem inevitable. The stories we tell ourselves about what will happen if we don’t get what we want can stop us from seeing other conditions of possibility for our lives.
To bastardise the immortal words of Winnie-the-Pooh, it’s entirely valid to suppose that quitting your PhD might have negative consequences – it might! But supposing it didn’t?
New stories, new identities, new optimism
One of the odd, daunting things I discovered about reading quit lit (when you’re not sure if you want to quit) was the fear that it might actually change your mind. But if you’re willing to try it, I’d suggest that you take the risk.
Since I first considered quitting, a number of excellent articles, books and guides have sprung up. My favourite are those books that help you locate purpose and passion outside an academic identity. I recently read Doctoring: Building a Life With a PhD by Chris Cornthwaite, which I wish had been published in my second year. Cornthwaite is the founder of Roostervane, a blog that teaches graduates of any degree to build careers, and his book gives pragmatic, empowering advice with exactly the right positivity-to-snark ratio.
It should really be no surprise that Cornthwaite resonates with me, because much of his advice boils down to rewriting your own story. His writing has the enviable ability to smack you in the face with painful insight and then pick you up again: “People who tell themselves self-defeating, limiting stories, will have self-defeating, limited lives… Your story is your identity. If you are in the process of changing identities, change your story.”
As Cornthwaite, Berlant and numerous cultural theorists show us, stories (especially powerful cultural narratives) shape our sense of what’s possible, which means that they can be both limiting and empowering. It’s much easier to critically analyse other people’s stories than your own, but turning my critical gaze onto myself – while forcing myself to practice positivity – helped me to build a more resilient sense of self that doesn’t depend on a specific career or industry.
As Cornthwaite writes about his own experiences, “The grand, unifying theme of my life was not a job. It was a bigger sense of calling that drove my actions.” Finding that ‘grand, unifying theme’ is hard, and from personal experience, it’s easy to get bogged down in negative “what if’s” and “oh, but I couldn’t’s”.
If this is you, then try this exercise with me:
- Imagine a future in which you’re happy, fulfilled, and proud of your achievements. Don’t worry about being too realistic – we’re not making a plan yet, we’re just exploring the fantasies that resonate with your sense of purpose.
- If negative or limiting thoughts intrude, practice putting them aside for later. Write them down on a different page if you need to physically get them out of your system, but leave them out of the futures you write about.
- Now imagine another future. Make sure you have at least one academic and one non-academic story, but do more if you have time. The more the better!
- What do you love about each fantasy? Are there any common themes, or sources of joy/fulfilment that keep popping up? If you’ve written down any really wild fantasies, then which aspects of those dreams excite you? (Mine is making first contact with aliens, and what I took from it is that I’m excited by adventure, other cultures, and thinking on the edge of the unknown).
- Now think about your fantasies seriously; how could they become real possibilities? What would you have to do or learn to achieve them? Better yet, how could you work towards more than one at the same time?
The first goal of this exercise is to train yourself out of the belief that only one future or one outcome can deliver the kind of life you want. The second goal is to discover the skills, experiences and goals that you most value; the things that will drive you no matter how you choose to pursue them.
Practicing optimism without attachment
When I started to seriously consider the possibility of leaving academia, I tried hard to get invested in narratives of quitting. In hindsight, I felt that I couldn’t detach from my unhealthy relationship with academia unless I could replace it with an equally resonant fantasy, something that would click into place and give me a single direction again. In other words, I was trying to solve the problem of too many eggs in one basket by tipping them all into another basket. What I really needed (and what I’m working on again now) was to practice optimism without getting too attached to the futures I was imagining.
In a Medium article that went viral earlier this month, Tara Haelle described the advantages of using ‘both-and’ thinking to deal with ambiguous loss, which is “any loss that’s unclear and lacks a resolution”. The main point of the article is that the chronic uncertainty and attrition of COVID-19 has exhausted our ‘surge capacity’, which is the collective name for the physical and mental systems we use to survive periods of extreme stress. But Haelle’s exploration of ambiguity, uncertainty and the possibility of loss applies equally to the microcosm of pandemic life that we find ourselves in right now: completing a PhD, or building a life after graduation, in the face of deep personal and professional precarity.
‘Both-and’ thinking appeals to me because it’s essentially a way of practicing different kinds of optimism without attachment, or to put it another way, to resist the rigid binary of all-or-nothing thinking. As Haelle notes, both-and thinking is a strategy often recommended to help people deal with ambiguous losses, where loss is possible (or even probable) but unresolved. It involves accepting two contrasting ideas simultaneously, such that both could be true.
If you, like me in the past, have built up the emotional stakes of staying in academia to apocalyptic proportions, then practicing both-and thinking may help ease the angst. An example, drawing on your fantasy work above, might be: “I’m deeply invested in academia, and I could find happiness and fulfilment in another career.”
Back in my second year, I didn’t know what I was trying to do or what it was called. But it was this kind of thinking that ultimately took the pressure off. It gradually helped me internalise the belief that finishing or not finishing my PhD didn’t have to be a binary matter of success or failure. It could be a free choice, with no right or wrong answer, because I had the skills and drive to build a good life either way.
And so do you.
Getting it done
Once I forcibly disentangled my life goals from the fantasy of the PhD and started to believe, I discovered something that startled me:
Finishing the PhD was not the only way of achieving my goals, but it was still the most straightforward. Not only that, but I discovered that despite all the flaws of academia I still wanted to be here.
I won’t say that finishing it was easy. To make my research viable again, I had to kill a lot of darlings. I slashed seven of the eight case studies I’d planned, threw out most of my conceptual framework, and allocated two months to a literature review of an entirely alien field. I mystified my poor supervisor when I came back from leave announcing that I was going to study national security, of all things.
Finding new stories might mean building them from scratch. Or, like me, you might end up renovating an old fantasy – clearing out the cobwebs, updating the paint and inhabiting it anew. My turning point was discovering that what I really want, more than an academic job, is to publish books. I’ve wanted to be an author since I was a small child, but when I was fifteen I always planned to write the next doorstopper of a fantasy trilogy. A non-fiction book about superheroes and national security never entered my mind!
But once it did, I realised (or remembered, really) that finishing my PhD had a purpose beyond getting an academic job, which had been my primary source of anxiety and paralysis. I began to feel the drive to write again, because I could see multiple futures in which it could turn out well. I gradually recognised that although academia was the obvious pathway to fulfil my goals, it wasn’t the only one… which meant that not only did I have a choice, there were no wrong answers.
For me, today, academia is just one of many avenues through which I can pursue the kind of intellectual and creative work that I want to build my life around. I’m a deep believer in universities and academia, but I’m not bound to it.