I completed my doctorate in January 2024.
Six years of teaching had come before it. Lecture halls, marked papers, students who called me by a name that carried weight.
From the outside it looked like a life well-built. From the inside, near the end, it had started to feel like a room I had memorised. Leaving academia was not something that I had planned.
I knew every corridor. Every rhythm of the semester. Every kind of student question and what it actually meant beneath the surface. I had mastered the shape of something I was no longer sure I wanted.
So I left. I walked away from the institution, the title, and the role I had spent years earning. I went abroad to study something completely different.
It was the most frightening decision I had made in years.
The Silence Nobody Warns You About
Nobody tells you about what comes after leaving academia.
Not the peaceful kind of quiet. The kind that arrives when every structure that told you who you were is suddenly gone, and you are standing in the empty space wondering what is actually left.
I had a title for six years. I had a clear place in a room, a role that answered the question of who I was before I had to answer it myself.
That goes immediately when you leave.
The credentials stay on paper. But the daily sense of knowing where you belong, that disappears the moment you stop showing up.
I thought I was prepared for it. I had even told myself the transition would be manageable. I really was not prepared at all.
Leaving academia does not feel like a crisis when you do it. It feels like one three months later, when the bravery has faded and the new thing has not yet arrived.
The Classroom I Did Not Expect
Going abroad put me back in a classroom. But on the other side of it. Which sounds like a small thing until you are actually sitting there, six years of teaching behind you, genuinely unsure of the answer.
Where I had explained things for six years, I now reached for them. Nobody deferred to me. Nobody softened their feedback because of my title.
My peers saw me as exactly what I was. A person trying to understand something, sitting next to other people trying to understand something.
That equality did something I did not expect. I became more confident in that room than I had been in any lecture I had delivered from memory.
Not the polished confidence of expertise. Something quieter. The confidence of a person who has looked at their own confusion without flinching.
The most useful thing teaching gave me was the ability to recognise when real learning was happening. I had stopped recognising it in myself. Being a student again reminded me what it felt like.
Being the confused one in the room, after years of being the one with answers, is one of the most clarifying things I have ever done.
Too Much and Not Enough
Then I came home. And this is the part that has no clean narrative.
The positions I might have stepped into had been filled. Restructured. Quietly dissolved. The cross-disciplinary thinking I had built abroad did not translate as cleanly as I had hoped into the vocabulary of available jobs.
I found myself doing something I had spent years helping students avoid. Moving without direction. Filling days with possibilities that had not yet hardened into plans.
There is a specific feeling to being highly qualified and professionally adrift at the same time. The world has a quiet script for it. It says your problem is one of fit. That you are somehow too much and not enough simultaneously.
That script wears you down if you let it run long enough without interruption. And for a while, I let it run.
The hardest part of leaving academia was not the uncertainty. It was being told, quietly and repeatedly, that the uncertainty was my fault.
What Remains
I do not have a clean answer yet.
What I do know is that the skills from six years in a lecture hall do not vanish because the room changed. Reading a room. Holding an argument together. Asking the question that opens rather than closes.
Those travel. They wait. They find new contexts if you give them the patience and space to do so. I have seen enough of that in the past year to believe it.
I am not who I was standing at the front of that lecture hall. I am also not yet who I am becoming.
For now I exist somewhere between those two people.
It is uncomfortable. It is also, honestly, the most present I have felt in years.
This space is not a waiting room. It is just where the work happens to be right now.
Read Next: What Living in London Actually Feels Like. Nobody Warned Me.
Your Brain Does Not Know Where You End. It Is Always Guessing.
