It’s been 96 days since I quit my tenure-track job. On one hand, it’s hard to believe that much time has passed, as the decision still feels raw and terrifying. On the other, I’ve grown and learned more in the past 96 days than any other period of my life, except maybe those first surreal months at Cirque le Soir Shanghai (will I ever stop talking about that? No).
Quitting my job was at once an act of impulse and the thing I’d been planning to do for ten years. The timing of it was more abrupt than I thought it would be, but I’d been crafting an email of that kind in my head since I was in graduate school. First it was to my dissertation committee, then to my boss at Carnegie Mellon, then it was to NYU Shanghai and retracted, and then finally, fourth time’s a charm, it was for real on December 10, 2015.
I thought maybe I had one more year in me, but I’d been saying that for a long time. In anticipation of leaving, for the past several years I’ve been very careful about money and built up some savings so I can survive without a job for a bit. How long those savings will last is unclear, but I have a feeling that before my savings are depleted, I will have a breakdown that will lead me to seek work desperately, be it as a bartender, construction worker ( two jobs I have always wanted to do), or, ideally, a professional version of myself (I’m rolling my eyes, too).
After I quit I was surprised to learn that most people thought that meant I did it to focus exclusively on circus and comedy. I see now that’s a natural interpretation: Person has two lives and quits one life, leaving the remaining one as the obvious choice.
But that’s not my intention. Yes, my decision was motivated in part by realizing that both my circus and comedy careers are at stages where if I really want to get better I need to be in New York. For circus, this is because I need coaches and new audiences. For comedy, this is a pure stage time calculation: I need mad reps. This concludes the crossfit portion of this essay.
The other part of my motivation, as I have discussed, is that I never wanted to be a professor, yet had been in academia my entire adult life. When I first quit my job I mainly did so because I decided life is short, and I don’t want to wonder forever if I was capable of something else. Being a professor is, genuinely and empirically, one of the best jobs on the planet. Who walks away from the thing everyone wants, just because they felt like they needed to “prove” something to themselves -- what, that they can do something else -- just for the sake of it? I felt like a child who gets upset when her parent does something for her, and insists on doing it herself, even though she’s worse at it.
This is a terrible analogy.
But this is genuinely what I thought after quitting.
After I quit my job I expected to feel massive relief: It was something that literally had kept me up all night for years (most acute being last summer when I literally could not sleep for months), and I thought that when I finally pulled the trigger/plug/detonator key (Hi, I’m James Bond) I would feel nothing but immense, pure relief.
I did feel that, for 2.5 glorious, jetlagged, drunk, and hungover days. My friend and partner in crafting our own paths and I quit our jobs on the same day. I went to his party the next night to celebrate, and then another party the following night. Apart from sobbing while a drag queen performed a lip syncing number to Katy Perry’s “Roar” in Williamsburg because it reminded me of Cirque Shanghai and I realized this decision meant I was abandoning my beloved Chinese Cirque friends (Panjun, Jimmy, Agang, and Cindy), I felt pretty damn marvelous.
On Sunday of that weekend I woke up to the sounds of the East Village and it felt amazing to think this city might finally be home. I wandered around Manhattan feeling wonderful about myself. I lounged in a chair in the Flatiron district and stared at the unseasonably warm sky and felt like I’d finally done it -- moved to New York -- the thing I always wanted. A friend called to invite me to an open mic around the corner. I was at peace -- that long sought after peace I’d truly never had as an academic.
Then Monday morning came.
I woke up in a full panic.
Deep, wrenching, horrific panic, the likes of which I’d never experienced or imagined. All my anxiety -- fear about the future -- was replaced with actual fear about the present.
My entire identity is wrapped up in being a professor -- from the double life schtick to the idea that it’s the most noble pursuit (I was brainwashed in graduate school as much as anyone can be) to the deep feeling that kept me in academia as long as I was: That the only way to make a truly lasting contribution to humanity is science, and the only place you can really do that is the academy.
I got up one morning in that dark, dark week and -- perhaps this is oversharing -- I undressed to take a shower and was overcome with fear and just huddled on the floor, sobbing, naked, terrified. It didn’t help that I was in New York on university business, and so was staying in a very nice apartment right in Washington Square that NYU sets aside specifically for NYU Shanghai faculty. Why would I leave this? What have I done? What the fuck am I going to do next?
Things would get worse before they got better.
On Wednesday of that week I had the opportunity to meet two of my greatest idols in the artistic/smart-people-not-in-academia world. They both represented what a path out of academia might look like to me -- one that actually seemed good. I told them about my recent decision and, over copious whiskeys, they both told me I’d made a huge mistake.
If you’ve never had two people you look up to most in the world tell you that your recent horrifying life choice was the wrong one, then allow me to congratulate you. Waiting on the subway platform at the end of that night for the F train at about 3 AM was one of the darker experiences I’ve ever had. “F” is for “Fucked”, I thought, to the hilarity of no one.
Here is how I survived that week, and the months since:
Two amazing things have come from quitting my job. The first is that I learned to rely on other people. I’ve been hell bent in my life on being independent. Yes, I overshare physically and emotionally on the Internet, but that’s really more of a one way projection. It wasn’t until I was completely terrified and vulnerable that I learned I to truly count on others.
Many of my friends reached out to me, even without my asking. I got messages and emails from friends around the world, all at exactly the right time. One morning I was feeling especially horrible and out of nowhere a friend from trapeze class wrote me an email with the subject line, “You Are Not Alone.” To this day I feel some peace anytime I even think about that email.
Other friends were there at a moment’s notice. One week after I quit I texted my friend who’d also quit, saying I was having real doubts. Instantly he called me and talked me off the cliff, saying basically: trust the person that made the choice. You’re supposed to feel terrified this early on. You can’t give up one week in. Give it a second.
Another time, months later (this is a long process), I was trying to do some work in a café in Williamsburg. This was a huge mistake. There I was, on my laptop trying to think up jobs I could do other than be a professor, and trying dubiously to work on a book proposal or TV pitch, or god knows what, and I looked around me and everyone was identical to me: semi nerdy looking, hunched over a MacBook Air, half shaved head, all trying to be creative hipster entrepreneurs.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a panic attack, but this was pretty close. I had to force myself to keep breathing. I’d set a timer because that’s how I work now -- on a self-imposed clock. It took all my mental and physical strength to stay in that chair in that café surrounded by clones of myself until the timer went off. All I could think in between actually losing my vision and trying to pull the skin off my face was: Why would I leave an exotic and wild life in Shanghai, the city where all my dreams came true, to come be one of a million in New York?
The moment my timer went off I sprinted home, which at the time was a short-term sublet in south Williamsburg (you know you’ve really done it when you’re squatting in your younger brother’s apartment -- no offense, brother!). I was lying in the fetal position at the foot of this borrowed bed and had opened a blank email window where I was about to write an email to the Vice Chancellor of NYU Shanghai asking for my job back. At that moment a friend posted something on Facebook and I messaged him asking to talk. We talked. He saved me from sending that email. I do not know if he knows this.
In general, for better or worse, my commitment device of posting publicly about quitting my job also actually worked. I can’t tell you the number of mornings I woke up and fantasized, hard, about crawling back to NYUSH. The only -- truly, only -- reason I didn’t capitulate was because I’d made a whole thing on the Internet to you guys of quitting (and because so many of you have been encouraging). I even considered secretly asking for my job back and just not telling anyone. I would lie there and writhe around, trying to think up a way back in -- truly an Odysseus at the mast situation.
This story would not be complete if I didn’t include my parents and brother. They answered so many panicked emails and calls and sobbing conversations with me (Merry Christmas! Your unemployed, thirty-something daughter is home!) that I cannot count them here. I wouldn’t have made it without them.
Here’s the second thing I’ve learned:
The world is bigger than I thought it was.
My hope with quitting my job was that it would force me to put myself out into the rest of the world more aggressively than I ever had before, and that it would cause me to look upon the world with new, more open eyes to what kinds of things humans can actually do as careers. I am pleased -- and fucking relieved to be honest -- to report that both of those things have come true.
I still don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know for sure that I want to stay involved in science (my love for social science and complexity have not gone away; it’s the forum of the formal university that bugs me). I didn’t know what else people did in the science world besides academia, and I knew I wasn’t happy there. There’s much about universities that I love -- at their best I think they are humanity’s greatest hope. At their worst, they are inflated, bureaucratic institutions that have a monopoly on higher education (someone else’s words, not mine) and at once are exclusionary and mandatory for later success. I do not find this acceptable.
The part of being in a university that I love is being around smart, curious people -- faculty and students alike. I love that my work doesn't necessarily have to have a ready application to the real world, and I love that my students and I get to debate abstract game theoretic models and broad questions like the causes of war. There are few better ways we humans can spend afternoons on this planet.
The parts that I don’t love? Committee work. Grade complaints. Recommendation letters. Search committees. But, ok, these are maybe 20% of the job. The main part is that the pace of life is slow and it means I don’t perform to my best potential. I know this to be true. I was recently looking at a to-do list from my first week at NYU Shanghai from August 2013. About 70% of the projects on that list are ones on which I’ve made no progress, including turning my dissertation into a few published papers, which had in turn been on my list since December 2011.
I don’t like that academic life lets me be lazy. I am over spending Monday mornings in bed while my peers go to work. I know I am capable of more. Part of why I got so involved in circus is that I was genuinely bored with my life.
Academia suits many people well. I am just not one of them. I know, deep down, that if I am going to be someone I am proud of in life, I cannot stay in the comforts of the academy, no matter how absolutely, positively, amazing it is to be paid to talk to smart, curious young people about stuff you love, and to have such flexibility that you can also perform circus at night and train in contortion for entire summers at a time. And afford kale chips all the while!
Leaving my job was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I’m never going to know what I’m capable of if I don’t leave the nest. The fact that I am even thinking about what science looks like outside the academy is a massive step.
Here’s a final thing I am still learning: I might be stronger than I think I am.
This was a long way of saying thank you to everyone for the support, and thank you especially to those who’ve challenged my decision. You’ve helped me more than anyone.
I am still accepting donations for kale chips.
