One of the worst parts of academia (and a lot of other creative careers) is all the damn waiting for things with pretty low odds but which you *just* might get, things which could often make a huge difference for your career and, often (perhaps too often) even your self-image.

The two most stressful and central of these are getting into grad school and getting a tenure track job, both of which are crazily competitive and stressful. A distant third is getting tenure, which isn't exactly *not* stressful, but which is usually much more straightforward.

But there are also all the smaller bits of anxiously waiting for things that are *directly* related to bigger stuff like applying to schools and for jobs: sending articles to high-stakes journals, sending out a book proposal, applying for grants. All long waits for low odds.

But there are similar problems with waiting for these things, both the "smaller" goals, like sending articles, proposals, grant apps, and the the bigger goals, like grad school, job, tenure, trying to get a job somewhere else for some life situation, etc.

The main one is just the frustration of feeling like you lack control or that much agency at all. That's why I always tell people that trying to get tenure is just *so much less stressful* than trying to get a job or get into grad school. It's still stressful of course!

I don't know if my articles will get accepted where I send them (they're usually not!). I don't know how my book will be reviewed or how my tenure letters will look. But I do have some control over my productivity, and my hunch is I just keep doing what I'm doing and I'm okay.

Getting admitted to grad school or getting a job just aren't as straightforward as tenure (at most places). Experientially they're more like submitting an article. There are always more qualified candidates and articles than spots and the final deciding cuts can be pretty random.

Knowing that arbitrariness has this weird effect of being at once encouraging (I could have gotten that, I'm qualified, I just didn't get it for whatever reason) and also destabilizing, because it makes it hard to create a coherent narrative besides the world is kind of chaotic.

(This is the part of any of these threads, before I say what strategies have helped me personally, where I say the actual solutions have to be structural. We are sociologists, dammit.)

I wish I could give better advice than what I heard from one of my advisers at my postdoc: the most important organ for an academic is not the brain, it's the stomach. You gotta learn to get knocked over and keep getting back up. Which is obviously easier said than done.

And the other thing, probably the most important thing, is to find self-worth outside of work. There's just too much damn contingency in this job, even if you have tenure. You have no idea if anyone will ever cite you again, no matter how famous you are. You're not your work.

That's almost impossible for any of us, especially after years of overachieving, and especially after pouring so much of ourselves into our work, which is creative, which really does come from something deep in ourselves. But that's the third thing. Be proud of your work, now.

Be proud of your work now. Don't wait for your adviser to tell you it's good. Don't wait for the reviews to come back. Don't wait until you get into a school or get a job or get tenure or get poached by wherever. Your work is worth being proud of or it's not. And I think it is.

That doesn't mean your work can't improve! That doesn't mean we don't produce bad work. I produce so much bad work, as others will gladly tell you. But I think I also make some pretty cool stuff, and I'm not good at recognizing that absent certain credentials, but I'm trying to.

These recognitions don't make the waiting a whole lot easier actually. They don't make the system any more fair or less stressful or less in need of (structural!) change towards justice. But they have made me better able to sit with myself as I wait. And that really is something.

I'm someone who used to get so depressed in summers as a teenager that I was somewhat actively afraid for my life. If I wasn't moving, doing, acting, I was in my thoughts, worried, even at 14, about my failures and potential failures and many sins and already wasted potential.

Now medicine and therapy and other tools have really helped me, and as I've said before, I'm really happy to talk to anyone, especially grad students, about meds (I still take them), counseling (yes!) and mental health strategies more broadly. But I still get weird when I wait.

So all to say waiting can be ever harder for those of us with mental health issues. But it truly doesn't have to be impossible. It's taken me a long time to realize that if life isn't meaningful in between the big moments then really it's not meaningful in the big moments either.