How to know it’s time to leave academia (even before you know what’s next)

You’re not staying in academia because you love it anymore. You’re staying because every time you picture leaving, the same question shuts you down: to do what, exactly?

You don’t have an answer. So you stay. Another semester. Another cycle. You tell yourself you’ll go the moment you figure out the next thing. The next thing never arrives, so neither do you.

I want you to consider things differently: those are two different decisions, and you’ve been treating them as one.

How to decide whether it’s time to leave academia

There’s the question of whether to leave, and why. And there’s the question of what to do instead. Most people believe they have to answer the second one before they’re allowed to act on the first. You feel like you can’t responsibly walk away from a known thing until you’ve got another known thing to walk toward.

It sounds responsible, but it’s actually what keeps you stuck. As long as the two are welded together, the absence of a perfect next step becomes a permanent reason to stay in something that isn’t working.

What it looks like to separate leaving academia from what comes next

A recent guest on my podcast described exactly this. She’d reached a breaking point with her institution and started doing the thing that felt logical: applying for other jobs. Leaping from one system straight into another. A known thing for a known thing.

It overwhelmed her because she was trying to solve both decisions at once while she was still inside the thing she was trying to leave.

There’s a moment she described that stayed with me. During a strike, faculty couldn’t be on campus, so she was standing on the sidewalk in the rain at the very edge of it. And she realized she was finally looking at the institution from the outside. That was the shift. Not “here’s my plan.” Just: I need to decide whether I’m leaving first. Then I can work out what comes next.

So she took a leave of absence to give herself room to make the first decision cleanly, without the second one crowding it out.

Why deciding first changes everything

When you stop demanding a finished plan as the price of leaving, something loosens. You can look at your situation honestly, instead of through the fog of “but what would I even do?” You get to ask whether this is still right for you as its own question, separate from the job market, separate from the fear.

And the next step, the one you were convinced you had to have locked before you could move tends to show up after you’ve made the room for it, not before. My guest didn’t leave because she’d found editing. She found editing because she’d already decided she was done waiting for the institution to value her.

You’re allowed to know it’s time before you know what’s next. Those were never the same question.

If you want the full conversation this came from, it’s on Episode 88 of my podcast Leaving Academia. And if you’ve quietly already decided, and you’re ready to start looking at what your skills could become, my free workbook is a good place to begin: AcadiaEditing.com/map