Academia & my inner critic

CW: anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Part of it is that life got busy and then I went on vacation and then life got busy again! But when I get real with myself and reflect on the past month and a half, most of it was that I had a surge in the inner critic. It snuck up on me and took up more real estate in my mind than I realized. It was telling me that no one cared about what I wrote, that what I said and how I said it wasn’t good enough, that I was lazy, and so on and so forth.

Needless to say, my inner critic derailed my plans. Any time I thought about sitting down to write, I let my inner critic convince me that I couldn’t: “you’re not doing a full week of writing so what’s the point?”, “you don’t have any good ideas”, “there are so many people around you who have already tackled that issue”, “you’ll never be as good or as well-regarded as those ‘other people’ so why write?” and so on. And when I am tired or feeling so-called weaknesses in my armor, my inner critic feels particularly savage. It busts out those passive aggressive questions: “are you sure you want the public to see that?”, “well, if you can’t do it perfectly, why bother?”, “what do you know?”, “why can’t you just be better?”, and “why would anyone want to listen to you?”

When I see those words on the proverbial page, they make me wince with pain even as I recognize that my inner critic served a purpose: it’s a culmination of a bunch of voices from the past that have morphed but stuck with me nonetheless. They protected me when I was young and motivated me to excel in academia and bust my butt… but at what cost? My inner critic became a motivator, a support of sorts that I came to need in order to be productive at all costs.

One thing I want to make absolutely clear is that there is no direct correlation between academia and the inner critic. I’m sure there are plenty of academics who have only slightly disruptive inner critics (where they are is beyond me). What I want to say is that academia feeds off of inner critics like mine that entice me into working myself into the ground for standards that are unclear yet always changing (unbeknownst to me).

The perfect storm of a super competitive academic job market, burnout, and my inner critic also made me mean, bitter, and whiney. Truly, it brought out the worst parts of me that I feel shame over to this day. I would complain about why I wasn’t getting a tenure track (TT) job over anyone else, I work so hard so I deserve x/y/z, I am making myself sick over here so why am I not being rewarded? I genuinely believed that while I critiqued racialized discourses of work, like meritocracy and laziness, I was outside of it; that some how I was the exception to the rule and meritocracy would winner over the patronage, nepotism, and let’s be real luck of the draw of academia.

It wasn’t until I had the worst depression of my life a few years ago in my shiny postdoc that my therapist helped me to understand my inner critic as separate to myself, and thus voices I could fight. She asked me what I thought triggered it, and I just couldn’t see beyond its relentless berating. What she led me to realize was that the precarity and the uncertainty of academia added to an environment that continuously chewed me/us up and spit me/us out broke me. It wasn’t the individual faculty close to me who were doing it; it was a system who was doing it, which of course is comprised of faculty and administrators in positions of power to happily prop it up and perpetuate it. And my inner critic, who I believed to be myself, thrived on the implicit (and sometimes explicit) messages that those who hustle and grind themselves to the bone or illness make it. It was a kind of martyrdom or right of passage.

I am about to tell you how I felt not because I want your sympathies or platitudes but because I think it’s important to be real and transparent about the costs of academia. Even now I can hear my inner critic saying “well, that was your choice to grind yourself down. You could have built in strategies to avoid depression. Not everyone has the same inner critic as you. These are conditions that exist in all industries.” Sure, all of those are true. And if my peer network in real life and on social media is anything to go by, many of us are/were struggling with the structural conditions of academia, which then severely impacts mental and physical heath. Academia (at least the corner I come from) is unique in the intense demands placed on us combined with the continuous devaluing of our work and extremely low pay for the expertise we are told we allegedly have (ie: there is no direct path to so-called “industry” like many STEM disciplines).

At the tail end of job season 2018, isolated from everyone, everywhere, and everything I cared about (besides the dear friends I was making!), I went into crisis mode. I had submitted what I thought was a key job application and just went off the deep end. I lost the ability to do anything. I had that kind of depression that debilitates you to the point that you can’t get out of bed and all you can do is lie there and listen to your inner critic yelling and berating you for not being able to engage in the most basic of tasks. I lost the ability to think clearly and executive functioning was basically impossible. Any kind of decision making, from “what do I eat for dinner” to “do I need to shower?” felt like a herculean task.

I digress. At that moment, I lost the ability to use my inner critic as motivation and punishing myself to success. So my therapist had to keep reminding me that those voices yelling at me were not me. They had just taken over. At my rock bottom, I truly believed I was the laziest piece of shit, I was a waste of space, I didn’t deserve anything, the world was a better place without me, no one would miss me, I didn’t know anything, I didn’t contribute anything to the world, and I was just useless. I know objectively that these thoughts are untrue but when you hear it so many times, you begin to believe it. And I knew it was really bad when the questions began with “why can’t you just…?”

All I could do was watch TV and run… and a lot of both of them… I watched endless hours of TV because that’s all the energy I could muster and it distracted me from my inner critic. And I ran and ran for miles in the freezing cold… I trained for a half marathon because it was the only thing that would get me out of the house for a few hours and provide a few extra hours of relief when the endorphins kicked in. But then after a few hours the hurricane rolled back in. It’s like I was standing on a beach watching the hurricane roll back in as the endorphins slowly ebbed away. As you can tell, I wrote zero words for a few months.

Then there was the toxic positivity… The perfect storm of toxic positivity and inner critic made me utterly miserable. I thought that the cure for endlessly berating myself was to go 180 and be über positive. What is toxic positivity, you ask? For me, it’s that voice that tells me I can and I should will myself out of depression; that I just need to be more grateful and I’ll feel better. I think of those posters in that curly font… you know the ones… that say things like “live, love, laugh”.

And you know what? It just made me feel miserable. It made me feel like the underside of the bottom of the barrel and that I was even more useless because some mantras about gratitude couldn’t cure me of my screaming inner critic. So then the toxic positivity and the inner critic create the perfect storm of comparative suffering where I believed that I have it so great compared to others who were literally fighting for survival everyday so why was I so miserable (“hey! I have this shiny postdoc! I have a way better chance of getting a TT job!”)? If I just believed that I was lucky and I had all of my basic needs met, the brain fog of depression would just evaporate.

You can probably even tell by the way I’ve written above that I intuitively know my inner critic isn’t me by the way it says “you” but I guess one of my symptoms of depression is that I lose the ability to differentiate between my inner critic and myself. I hear the inner critic as my own inner dialogue, so much so that it becomes me, it is me. What did it take to put a wedge between the two? A whole lot of therapy, pain, running, and going on medication.

Now I can hear some people saying meds are not for them. Totally fair. I was one of those people who told my therapist that I had seen how anti-depressants had wreaked havoc on some people’s lives but I had reached a point where willing myself out of depression wasn’t going to work and I needed to do something that showed I still had a glimmer of care for myself. I was at my wits end. I had to try something. Anything.

But finally, taking control of my mental health meant I needed to exit full-time academia. I could lessen the power of my inner critic over my life removing myself from conditions that fed my inner critic uncontrollably. Let me be clear: anxiety and depression didn’t magically disappear because I’m not in academia anymore. As you can see, I still battle with my inner critic once every so often. What I could do, though, was to get myself out of situations that fed my inner critic and easily trigger depression, which in my case is feeling like I’m doing a bad job, that I’m not good at what I do, and that I don’t have a role to play.

So I looked at what I could control and that was the environments I put myself in. I couldn’t control the job market, the nepotism+patronage, the uncertainty, the pay, the precarity, the constant moving, and so on. But I do have control over whether I want to participate in this system. I had to remove myself from a situation that was just grinding me down into the ground to the point that I couldn’t differentiate these really harmful voices in my head from myself. The inner critic wasn’t serving me any more (and perhaps it never did) so I had to get myself out of a situation where I felt like I needed it to be productive and do whatever it takes to achieve my goals. And honestly, I did not know the severity of anxiety, depression, and constant stress and its impact on my physical, mental, spiritual, and social health until I got myself out of there.

As the past few months have shown me, my inner critic is still there and rearing its head once in a while. And with job stability, good pay, and great colleagues, I don’t need my inner critic to spur me on to success and I have a lot more energy and time to fight my inner critic and continue to nurture the positive self-talk that I’ve been lacking for so long. Since I’m not scrambling for survival and I’m in a job where I have no history, my self-worth isn’t tied to my work. (I can hear my inner critic creeping in saying “yeah, but your job isn’t perfect! Leaving academia doesn’t cure everything!”). And cultivating that positive self-talk is hard af. It doesn’t come naturally to me. But I have more energy to practice!

I guess what I’m trying to underscore is that academia doesn’t provide a lot of choices for individuals but we do have control over whether we participate in an environment that feeds my/our inner critic. I just got to the point where I had to try something different to deal with my inner critic and mental health. I/you have the choice to prioritize your mental health over anything you produce because if I may be a case study, you can churn out awards, publications, students, courses, and still not have a TT job at the end. We’ve got one life to live. Make it freaking good!

Here’s to prioritizing mental health and fighting back against your inner critic!