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Whenever I’ve fallen behind on doing something, I try as much as I can to avoid creating an apology and explanation that sounds like this:

“I’m sorry I didn’t ______; I wasn’t able to get to it because I’ve just been so busy.”

I dislike it when other people use that rationalization with me, so I try not to use it with others. Busy-ness, to me, is not an adequate explanation for not getting to something. I want to share about dealing with chronic illiness:

Traditionally, the experience of serious illness has been approached in two ways: (1) a gloomy perspective of resignation, self-denial, and helplessness, or (2) a Pollyanna approach that denies altogether that there has been a real trauma. Both of these perspectives distort and disguise the reality of chronic illness.

The first perspective views the chronically ill person as a failure. This is the patient who does not respond to the “miracle” of modern medicine, and somehow the lack of recovery is often perceived as the patient’s fault. This attitude of blame accounts for some of the worst psychological abuses of patients by health practitioners and caretakers, an attitude typified by the too-frequently heard statement, “Stop complaining. You simply must adjust.” Unfortunately, the sick person may also adopt this punishing attitude toward himself or herself. Sadly, the word “adjust” too often means “resign,” “settle for less than a desirable existence,” and “surrender.” At its worst, “adjust” is just another way of saying “You are now a nonperson without the right to experience strong passions, desires, or fierce and unyielding hope.” All the anger and blame inherent in this attitude is misdirected: the patient rather than the disease becomes the target.

The Pollyanna approach is typified by — and fueled by — personal stories or testimonials of complete recovery from extreme illness or disabling conditions. These stories tug at the heartstrings and catch the fancy of all who read them. Besides creating false hope by overplaying the likelihood of complete recovery, these stories consistently underplay the sadness and feelings of worthlessness that are part of the legacy of any physical or emotional trauma.

Sometimes, it is useful in social situations to present yourself as a Pollyanna. When meeting new people and situations, it may be an advantage for you to let others think you have mastered your disease. The anxiety of other people is reduced by not having to confront illness. The danger is that this Pollyanna image may create a barrier between you and the people who can offer real help.

The resignation viewpoint holds little hope; the Pollyanna viewpoint holds little reality.

The approach I propose took shape as my own understanding developed. My experience as a patient, observer, and psychotherapist has allowed me to see the many ways in which people creatively adapt and use their individual internal powers of wholeness (the sense of being emotionally intact) to reduce the destructive effects of severe physical limitations and accompanying depression, rage, and fear. The wellness approach I present stresses both the subjective experiences of loss and your responsibility for looking outward to reestablish quality in your life.

Central to wellness is the concept of adaptation — the flexible, creative use of resources to maximize your choices and experiences of mastery. This is the key to creating and sustaining a sense of inner tranquility in the face of difficult realities. There is no need to deny grim facts of existence or to pretend to others that all is well when inside there is little except torment. To be psychologically well while physically sick involves the belief that your personal worth transcends physical limitations; you need positive self-esteem for true adaptation. This belief in your self-worth rarely emerges until what you have lost and grieved for stands second in importance to precious moments of inner peace and joy.

Each stage in the progress toward wellness involves loss, grief, and acknowledgment of internal pain. During difficult times, emotional pain can engulf your life. All sense of time and proportion fade. The scope and intensity of the psychological pain fluctuates day to day. At times, it carries you closer to invaluable inner resources. At times, like a dangerous undertow, this pain drags you far from your recognizable self. It may seem that you have no reason for living or that you are living only to experience pain. Even so, the reason for living is life. The incentive for becoming psychologically well is the potential for the future.

Illness is an emotionally as well as physically depriving experience. It can do lasting harm by threatening a person’s sense of well-being, competence, and feelings of productivity. At their worst, emotional reactions to illness may culminate in the feeling that life is meaningless. I do not share this belief; but I recognize how stress can make you feel this way.

Illness is a process, and like all processes it has different stages with different characteristics. We will discuss the stages below. The stages can occur in varying orders; often they are repeated. If a sick person lacks emotional support or a necessary feistiness, the process can stagnate, and one may be mired in one or another phase of the emotional transitions taking place. The emotional process begun by illness is a highly varied and individual one. Not everyone gets bogged down. Not everyone experiences all the stages discussed in the following sections. The stages are not part of a once-through program, but are repeated as symptoms recur or losses come about.

The level of adaptation is an upward spiral in which coping mechanisms, learned one at a time, can be combined with strategies learned at other times to make each bout of illness less emotionally upheaving.

How people react to chronic illness depends on many conditions. Three deserve note. The first is the severity of the illness. The very sick must put all their energy into healing and may not have the luxury of energy left over for emotional growth.

The second is the social support available. If you are willing to ask for help and you have a wide support network, you’ll have an easier time than if you are isolated.

The third condition is the preillness personality of the person. If you have always been pretty resilient, you are likely to have resilience in coping with the illness.

The emotional trauma of chronic physical illness is caused by loss of a valued level of functioning, such as the ability to drive or dance, for example. The chronically ill person not only suffers the loss of immediate competency but is deprived of an expectable future. No one’s future is ever guaranteed, but most people become accustomed to looking at the odds; if I invest my energies in a particular direction, I can be reasonably certain I’ll reach a desired goal in that direction. When illness intervenes, all past efforts may seem irrelevant — and in fact they may be.

In the face of such losses, to experience fear, anger, depression, and anxiety is normal. It would be abnormal to deny that your health and your life had changed for the worse. Serious emotional difficulties are more often the lot of people who do not acknowledge the emotional stress they feel and thereby bottle up depression or anxiety until these feelings are so powerful they break through their defenses. By the time an emotion becomes this powerful, it is much more difficult to survive its impact without severe scarring.

Is there anything that can help overcome the displacement and depression caused by physical loss and the loss of goals and dreams? I think the answer is an unqualified YES!

Goal-oriented striving, any experience of mastery, any outside acknowledgment of competence, a well-tuned sense of humor, any experience of joy, and the constant striving toward an inner state of tranquility are the aids that help overcome the displacement and depression of chronic physical illness.

These aids are of critical importance in the stages of the ongoing emotional process. I identify these stages as crisis, isolation, anger, reconstruction, intermittent depression, and renewal.

These are good summary categories for the whirl of emotions triggered by illness and we will take up each stage in turn, although in the course of an individual illness they may not always proceed in this order.

First, I’d like to second Recent PhD’s advice that potential academic leavers choose a specific point at which you are going to quit – or at least a point at which you will begin sending out resumes with the understanding that you will leave academia outright as soon as you are offered an outside job – even if it’s the middle of a semester. If you don’t do this, it will be far too easy to just continue postponing the decision over and over again until you’re just lingering in grad school or as an adjunct, afraid to actually cut the cord. And while I don’t think it’s ever too late to leave academia, you certainly don’t want to keep postponing the decision endlessly. So as I’ve hinted at before, I think recent PhD’s advice to sit down and make a decision about a concrete point at which you will officially be done with academia is critical for anyone considering quitting.

This advice works for grad students and full faculty as well as adjuncts, by the way. Come up with your own end point, not the ones academia assigns to us. If you’re utterly miserable and sure you want to do something else, there’s no sense in hanging around until you get tenure or until you finish the dissertation. If you’re leaving, the academic milestones shouldn’t matter for you anymore. Make a plan for leaving based on your own personal goals and preferences, and stick to it.

Recent PhD rightly emphasizes that people transitioning outside of academia need to market themselves as career changers, not as students looking for a first job after graduation. This is tremendously important. I’d like to double down on this point in particular:

“…you spent 10 years as an educator (a teacher, NOT a student – yes, you were in graduate school, but that was a matter of professional development.) … [you are] looking for new ways to use the talents you’ve aquired through your experience in the education industry.”

This is such a critical point, which I think a lot of potential academic leavers (especially those coming straight out of grad school) miss entirely. They think “what kind of job can I possibly get? I’ve been a student for X years. I’ve got no experience and any employer is going to laugh me out of the park for being a ‘student’ for this long.”

Screw that. Even if academia tries at every turn to emphasize how you’re “just” a student? You know better. After you finish coursework, you aren’t a student in any way that a nonacademic person would view it. You are working in education for a salary … even if that salary is just a graduate student stipend or adjunct per-class salary.

Do you feel weird about this? Don’t. It’s only within the system of academia that you’re still considered a “student in training.” To the outside world, designing and teaching a semester-long college course on your own is clearly work experience. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing it with a Ph.D. or a permanent contract or not. You were *working* as a teacher.

Similarly, in what world is that research project you designed and completed independently, won grant funding for, and got published in a professional journal a “school project” … while the same project completed by a faculty member is “work?” Bullcrap. Designing and carrying out a research project to publication is doing *work* in research, regardless of how many letters follow the author’s name.

It doesn’t matter how academia views you – the hierarchies that exist in academia are invisible to most of the outside world. To the outside world, you’ve been working as a college instructor and as a researcher. You’ve been earning a salary (no matter how small) while providing important services to the university and gaining professional development. This is work experience. Don’t bury it under “educational background” on your resume, and don’t hesitate in presenting yourself as a “career changer” in cover letters. That’s what you are.

Don’t get caught up in how academia views you. The outside world will view you differently.

From the Guardian’s piece on Sunday about the outing of Brooke Magnanti, aka Belle du Jour, the PhD who anonymously wrote the Diary of a London Call Girl blog (which was turned into a British TV show):

Among sex workers themselves there was little surprise that a well-educated woman like Magnanti had got into prostitution.  She took the job because she ran out of money as she was finishing her PhD; she is a now a research scientist. Hers was an extraordinary experience of prostitution; she was lucky, because prostitution ordinarily is, simply put, a condition that kills women.

The 34-year-old said she decided to unmask herself because the stress of the deceit was making her paranoid. Interest in her identity increased when her memoirs became a television series. Dr Magnanti, who now lives in Bristol and is a research scientist for The Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health, became a prostitute because she needed a job that left her enough time to complete her studies.

She kept her double life a secret even when she started the blog describing her experiences and the books which followed. Dr Magnanti told the Sunday Times she worked as a prostitute from 2003 to late 2004, and found it “so much more enjoyable” than her shifts in another job as a computer programmer. She told the newspaper “I don’t want this massive secret over me any more,” and that she feared an ex-boyfriend might reveal the true identity of Belle de Jour.

Sunday’s entry on the blog said: “It feels so much better on this side. Not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about. To be able to defend what my experience of sex work is like to all the sceptics and doubters. “Anonymity had a purpose then – it will always have a reason to exist, for writers whose work is too damaging or too controversial to put their names on. “But for me, it became important to acknowledge that aspect of my life and my personality to the world at large. “I am a woman. I lived in London. I was a call girl. “The people, the places, the actions and feelings are as true now as they were then, and I stand behind every word with pride.”

A spokesman for her employer, the University of Bristol, said: “This aspect of Dr Magnanti’s past is not relevant to her current role at the university.” The spokesman added that Dr Magnanti’s revelations would not affect her chances of future employment with the university.

Are there any graduate students and/or contract faculty in the Greater Toronto Area who would be interested in meeting up this summer specifically for a workshop on identifying transferable skills and converting an academic CV into a résumé? I’m currently having an email chat with a contract faculty person who’s really interested in working on this in a group context, but there are obviously some professional reasons to not go around trying to recruit colleagues to this kind of thing.

This is from an 2004 New York Times article about Google’s practice of routinely hiring Ph.D.s:

clipped from www.matr.net

Rajeev Motwani, a computer science professor at Stanford, says: “Good Ph.D. students are extreme in their creativity and self-motivation. Master’s students are equally smart but do not have the same drive to create something new.” The master’s takes you where others have been; the doctorate, where no one has gone before.

Until recently, when computer science students completed their long Ph.D. training and stepped into daylight, they were treated warily by industry employers. American business has had to overcome its longtime suspicion of intellect. “Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men,” an article published in the 1920’s in the American magazine, is a typical specimen of an earlier era. In modern times, computer scientists are hired, but a doctorate can still be viewed as the sign of a character defect, its holder best isolated in an aerie.

Xerox famously put together a dream team of computer scientists in the 1970’s, placed it on a hill in Palo Alto, Calif., and received, in short order, the modern easy-to-use personal computer and the laser printer. Unfortunately, neither the researchers nor Xerox corporate had any idea how to bring these creations to market, and the experiment was a business failure.

Steve Jobs avidly hunted and hired Ph.D.’s during his ill-begotten entrepreneurial experiment at NeXT Computer in the late 1980’s, while he was away from Apple. His NeXT computer, what he called a “scholar’s workstation,” was marketed exclusively to students for the low, low introductory price of $6,500. It failed for some inexplicable reason to sweep campuses. He has not been heard since to boast, as he did then, that 70 percent of his manufacturing employees had doctorates. (Admittedly, these were few, as the factory was highly automated.)

In 1991, Microsoft established its separate research organization, following contemporary orthodoxy, and sought Ph.D.’s to conduct research full time. Its mainstream recruiting, however, remains focused on undergraduates and master’s students.

“We’re not heavy into Ph.D. recruiting,” explains Kristen Roby, Microsoft’s director of recruiting at colleges in the United States. “We’re huge believers in hiring potential.”

Google, however, prefers those who have been trained for the maximum time setting on the university’s dial and who have experience in organizing their own research agenda. The company has not released data about its Ph.D’s for two years, but based on its history, the number is probably more than 100.

Instead of sending them to a separate, high-walled compound, the company places them among the rank and file. In the typical Google job listing, which asks for a bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree in computer science, is a three-word phrase rarely seen elsewhere: “Ph.D. a plus.”

Because Google is in the “quiet period” required after the filing of its public offering plans, the company will not say a word about its Ph.D.’s or anything else. But go to the top-ranked computer science departments, and you’ll feel the irresistible gravitational pull of the Googleplex. At Stanford, for instance, Google’s recruiting of computer science Ph.D.’s has been, in Professor Motwani’s diplomatic phrasing, “more successful than others,” which he attributes to the critical mass of talent the company has assembled.

Ed Lazowska, professor and former chairman of computer science at the University of Washington, says Google’s policy of reserving one day a week to do your own thing is “hugely attractive to potential employees.” Google has about as many Ph.D.’s from his university as Microsoft, but Microsoft is almost 30 times larger.

As the earlier failure of Mr. Jobs’s NeXT Big Thing shows, the prize does not necessarily go to the new kids with the highest density of Ph.D.’s on the map. Google is vulnerable to attack from anyone who devises a better search engine. And Microsoft may add search capabilities to Windows faster than Google can go on the counteroffensive and install its own plumbing in the PC.

WORKING in Google’s favor is its practice of putting new Ph.D.’s to work immediately in the exact areas where they have been trained – in systems, architecture and artificial intelligence. Google, the company, may falter, but Google, the human resources experiment, is unlikely to be the cause.

Microsoft has yet to disavow old templates for hiring. Its chief college recruiter, Ms. Roby, says that among computer science Ph.D.’s, “it’s less likely to find someone with the desire to work on projects that will ship every 24 or 36 months.”

Her intention is to convey the fast pace of product-development cycles at Microsoft. But the notion that software is released at intervals measured in years, burned on a CD-ROM, stamped with a new version number and stuffed in a box, is as relevant to Google’s continuous Web site improvements as a punch card. Nor is the notion that Ph.D.’s are unsuited for the punishing pace of the business workday empirically justified.

When the cone of silence is lifted, ask anyone at Google, starting with the chief executive: Eric Schmidt, Ph.D., computer science.

The proportion of full-time female faculty members in the U.S. almost doubled from 1984 to 2008 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2008). Yet, women continue to “leak” from the academic pipeline, especially from the tenure track. Of women faculty nationally, 31% hold non-tenure-track positions, 26% are on the tenure track, and 43% have tenure (AAUP, 2010). Compare this to male faculty: Although a lower percentage of the men start out on the tenure track, a much higher percentage of them, compared to women, hold tenure, and far fewer are on the non-tenure-track.
The question is— where do the women go and why? Understanding how motherhood affects the careers of academic women is one place to look. The childbearing years coincide directly with climbing the tenure ladder, leading women to delay or forgo having children. Only 1/3 of women who start on the tenure track without a child will ever have one (Mason and Goulden, 2004). Faculty women report having fewer children than they desired, or putting off having kids until after gaining tenure. Such findings suggest that the academic career may be a difficult place to combine career and motherhood.
Why might this be the case? Timing. The average age at which women receive the doctorate is 34, the time when college-educated women are beginning families (Marcus, 2007). Add seven (or more) years to tenure and a woman is in her 40‟s.
Yet, there is a paucity of attention paid to academic women as mothers. An example of this inattention comes from a 2005 report from the Provost‟s office at Virginia Tech, that summarized exit surveys of „voluntary departures‟ among tenured and tenure-track faculty. Women averaged 40% of the „voluntary departures‟, mainly pre-tenure, while they were only 20.6% of the tenured and tenure-track faculty. Women were significantly more likely to report feeling intimidated, harassed, or discriminated against in their departments, yet nowhere in the report were work-family issues discussed.
Explanations for why the women leave: Women opt-out, or do they? The notion that professional women freely choose not to work after becoming mothers- has been pushed in the media. The data suggests otherwise, with the majority of educated women with young children in the work force. In 2007, over 70% of women with children worked outside the home (Halpern, 2008). Statistics are similar for highly educated women in their thirties where 2/3 of those with a young child work outside the home (Boushey, 2005).
Another explanation for fewer women on the tenure track is that women choose the softer, less secure, lower paying academic routes, either in anticipation of having children or once they become mothers. Again, the notion of „choice‟ has been questioned and calls for further study.  In light of women‟s increasing presence in the academy, and their higher rates of leaving, work/family issues deserve far greater attention. A 2003 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that having children can have a devastating impact on the careers of academic women but not men (Wilson, 2003).
What is clear is that women in academia face unique challenges, which require further investigation if we are to create an academic environment that is supportive of women as parents, particularly during the early years of career and parenting.
Given the many unknowns about why women leave, our qualitative study was designed to explore academic women‟s experiences combining career and parenthood. We chose mothers of young children because the toddler years are particularly challenging for parents. Broad questions guided the study- What challenges do the women face? What changes occur when they become mothers? How does it feel to meet the demands of being a mother and a faculty member?