Today, I submitted my final grades for my last semester of teaching literature & theatre studies at my university. I was 4 years into the tenure-track and had just published my first academic book.

But I decided I was done. Here are a few reasons why... (1/ )

In grad school, we were conditioned to think that a tenure-track job was the goal. But we never discussed what sort of toll the single-track, die-in-this-position nature of this job might do to our psyches.

I am so much more than a professor. (2/ )

I consistently ran into this trend of being categorized as a human (status wise, especially) based on my tenure-track professor job title. This drove me crazy, especially when so many of my incredible colleagues were contingent. (3/ )

But it took me years to realize that I was complicit in their contingency by clinging to the *job to end all jobs* that I had been conditioned to revere in grad school. I was safe. They were not. (4/ )

This, and a healthy dose of disillusionment about what the tenure-track really looks like (workload and morale wise) at a teaching institution (which I wanted), made me decide that, hey, maybe I should try something else? (5/ )

But it *shocked* me how hard it was to break free from my own psychological hold on the tenure-track ideal. After all, I had been groomed for this. It's hard not to feel shame about walking away from a position that you spent so many years of your life training for. (6/ )

Here is something I think the academy needs to work on: not conflating people's sense of self with the position they hold within academia. We are complicit in this when we ignore the concerns of contingent faculty, especially when we ourselves are tenured or tenure-track. (7/ )

I feel so guilty and ashamed of calculating my self-worth based upon whether or not I was tenure-track.

For me, leaving my university and the safety of the tenure-track is an act of self-assertion. (Not saying it's this way for all, obviously.) (8/ )

I don't know who needs to hear this, but you don't have to have a tenure-track job in your field to matter.

I'm excited about leaning full-time into my work as a writer and performer.

Will it be harder? Yes. More honest? Definitely. (9/ )

But I was always more than just a professor. Now I'm just claiming that *more* and calling it for what it really is: a whole self.

(fin)