A call out of vocation

Leaving on a jet plane 🎵

Today’s newsletter is a little different. I’m sharing part of a longer piece I’m working on about the moment I realized I was going to resign my faculty position. I would be glad to hear your thoughts about it!

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I hear the voice just as my flight takes off.

Later, I wonder why I heard it on a plane, of all places. Maybe it’s because planes are, barring turbulence, a calm place for me. (Grounding, if you’ll permit the bad pun). I find the pause between origin and destination, the suspension above ground, the release of control, to be relaxing. It’s a bit of stillness in the constant rush that is my life as an academic scientist.

I’m typically traveling to give talks or attend conferences, so I spend plane flights either A) preparing the presentation I’ll give at the destination or B) catching up on the work I missed while I was gone. Even if I’m on vacation with my family, I’m still moronically answering emails, though my automatic out-of-office reply is of course turned on.

On this flight, though, I’m incapable of work; my brain feels numb and empty. I have been interviewing at three different institutions in another country and am on my way back home. All are exciting possibilities, likely to move my career forward by connecting me with new colleagues, new ideas, and new sources of funding.

And boy, do I need something new. I’m struggling and grumpy, exhausted yet barely sleeping. It feels like all I do is rush from meeting to meeting and deadline to deadline. I routinely get up at 4 in the morning to edit papers and reject manuscripts and write recommendation letters. I haven’t visited the growth chambers to check on our plants—one of my all-time favorite activities—in months.

And I have to admit, it wasn’t always this way. Once, being a Professor of Biology felt like a calling.

I remember my first few years on the tenure track as buzzy with an electric sense of agency and possibility. Gaining new knowledge about the natural world, filling in the gaps of our understanding, training the next generation of scientists—I was, honestly, living the dream. And now that I’ve been in my dream job for a decade and a half, I’m successful: I have tenure, we publish in good journals, I have steady research funding, and my lab group is smart and kind.

But I’m no longer even grudgingly thrilled, or modestly buzzing. Chronic insomnia means I rarely remember my dreams.

I know something is wrong, and I have been trying desperately to fix it. I’ve gone on sabbatical, used time-blocking, explored productivity hacks; attended writing bootcamps, peer mentoring groups, teaching workshops, and leadership trainings; gotten involved in science communication, co-founded a podcast, built up a Twitter following, and revamped my website; flipped my classes, contributed to my scientific society, and served as an editor at scientific journals. But none of this is working. So, why not a fresh start in another country?

On the flight over, I’d cautioned myself to stay open to all the possibilities, to avoid making any snap judgements. I ended up unable to process much anyway. The whirlwind days were filled with laboratory tours, giving talks, and lunching with young faculty. By the time I settle onto the plane home, I’m far too wiped out to think through potential future lives. I decide to spend the next 7 hours sitting with my eyes closed, in the blessed calm that is a transatlantic flight where you did not pay for Wi-Fi. I’ll wait to make decisions until I’m back home and can process with my husband. That decided, I arrange my books, my laptop, my ridiculously big bottle of water. Once there’s no more fussing to do, I screw in my earplugs and close my eyes behind a sleep mask.

The drone of the plane engines and the chatter of the flight attendants fade. That is when I hear the voice, like it was just waiting for a chance to get a word in edgewise. It’s coming from inside my own head.

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As I find out in the reading I do when I get home, hearing voices is a well-documented part of the human experience. It’s good to know I’m not alone; in fact, one of the most famous voice-hearers in western culture is the Greek philosopher Socrates. Yes, Socrates—the same guy we celebrate for demonstrations of logic and reason through iterative question-asking—had an inner voice he called his divine or daemonic sign. According to Plato, Socrates said his inner daemon “always forbids but never commands me to do anything which I am going to do.” (Apology, 31C-D). Apparently, he checked in with his daemon when making major decisions, and it would let him know when he should give something a pass (for example, getting involved in politics!).

If it’s good enough for Socrates, it’s good enough for me. And, when I actually think about it, I hear inner voices all the time. I hear a voice narrating my small daily decisions (“I’ll just answer this one email and then I’ll head home”), cheerfully coaching me through stressful times (“You can do this! You can answer this one last email before heading home”) or judging poor decisions and regretful past actions (“Uh, Liz, why are you answering emails instead of heading home?”).

Though, the voice I hear on the plane is different from all these more mundane and daily experiences. It seems to come from inside my head, behind my eyes or maybe the back of my throat. It isn’t narrating or coaching or judging. It’s not carrying on a conversation. Like Socrates’ daemon, it is a warning.

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What the voice in my head says is: “I don’t want any of these jobs.”

I sit up in my seat and rip off my sleep mask. This is bad. Not only is the voice saying that I don’t want any of the three jobs that I just spent a week of my life and more than a few Ambien interviewing for; it is saying that I don’t want any academic jobs at all, including the one I already have. The voice is telling me to leave academia altogether.

The flight attendants dim the lights, and the plane settles into its loud humming calm. I’m grateful as other passengers turn their attention inward, preparing for hours of passive waiting, because I don’t want anyone to notices that I’m crying, forced to blow my nose on those tiny, insufficient drink napkins you get on a plane. I’m shooting for a muted, business class kind of sobbing. I can’t help it; I’m overcome by such a weird mixture of feelings: grief, shame, fear, relief. Grief because I love my research and my research group, and the prospect of leaving them is awful. Shame because I’m a tenured full professor—reasonably well-published, reasonably well-funded, and reasonably well-respected—and how could such a reasonably well-privileged person leave? Fear because this voice is telling me to change everything I know about myself. Relief because I don’t have to keep trying to figure out what to do.

One emotion I don’t feel is surprise. By the time I’ve stopped crying, the realization that I don’t want to be a professor anymore feels inevitable, a done deal. It’s not like I haven’t thought of it or discussed it, I just never truly took the idea seriously until now.

And so, I process it like I would any other project that just landed on my desk: I pull out a notebook and sketch out a timeline. I list the people that would be affected and when: graduate students, postdocs, colleagues, courses, family, friends. It’s not a very long list; apart from people in my lab group that depend on me to help them to their next career stage, and the obvious effect on our family finances, I’m not really that needed. And things can be wrapped up within the next year, it seems.

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Carl Jung said that “the original meaning of ‘to have a vocation’ is to be addressed by a voice. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called.” Aside from his use of the generic masculine, this rings true for me. I don’t recall hearing any specific words when I first fell in love with biology as a high school student, but I do remember suddenly having a firm sense of purpose and destiny. I truly did feel called into academic science. And for 40 years, I never questioned that academic calling; in fact, I did all I could to obey it. Until, on a plane 30,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean, I heard the opposite of Jung’s vocational call—a call out of vocation.

Why did it take so long to hear this voice, this call out of vocation? Maybe that pause of a plane flight, combined with my exhaustion, jet lag, and a sense of looming decisions created the conditions necessary for this part of myself to be heard. But I think there’s more to it. In an article titled “Inner voice experiences: An exploratory study of thirty cases”, Myrtle Heery suggests that inner voices can represent a fragmented part of the self that is trying to communicate with the larger self. Maybe the voice I heard on the plane came from a part of myself that had either stopped talking, or that I’d stopped listening to. My project now, as I see it, is to move beyond a voice that calls me in or calls me out, to draw the many voices that make up the self into conversation.