On Not Leaving Academia, But Standing Outside It

🍏your Thursday Essay 3rd July, 2025

An original piece to get you thinking.

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Hi Scholar,

This week’s essay marks the final piece in the series I’m Not Leaving Academia, But I Am Standing Outside It. What began as a single essay unexpectedly grew into a three-part series published over the past month. I didn’t realise how much I had to share, how much I needed to let out. In trying to articulate the position I’ve taken since completing my doctorate in March, I found myself revisiting parts of my doctoral journey and my time with/in academia that I had long tucked away in the darker corners of my mind and heart.

The last two essays have been intensely emotional for me. They unearthed pain, anger, shock, frustration, sorrow, and helplessness but also hope, pleasure, joy, gratitude, and affection. I’ve shared my biography with you not only because the act itself has been meaningful – allowing me, as one reader wrote, to find my own human truth – but because I couldn’t otherwise articulate or ground my present and future stance. For me to stand tall, shoulders back, and declare, “Yes, I am not leaving academia, but I am standing outside it,” I had to take you through the story of how I got here in the first place. 

After all, what are we without our biographies? Don’t the things that happen to us mark the things we end up doing – as we write the next chapters of our lives?

Now that the time has come to share what I mean by standing outside the academe, this essay will differ a little from the previous ones. When the task is to describe what one is currently doing – and hopes to dedicate oneself to – the tone inevitably becomes more forward-looking. And while writing about one’s past often demands distance (not the spatial kind, but temporal in nature), writing about the present and future calls for a different kind of reflection: one grounded not only in experience, but also in thought.

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