The Messy Reality of Leaving

Sometimes you can’t leave well even if you want to

“Chanequa, you want to make sure you leave well,” my senior colleague and area head told me. It was a gentle, but clear, reprimand. No doubt he had heard the rumors floating around about my departure. The thing was, I wasn’t the one behind the rumors.

A few months earlier, I had announced my decision to resign from my tenure-track position and to transition to a grant-funded position in another division within the university. My plan was to work on the grant while pursuing seminary part-time, having recently understood my call to ministry. I wasn’t leaving because I was unhappy. My decision was motivated by the type of mentoring that I needed and the stronger links that the other division had with theology and spirituality. I’d discussed the issues openly with my area head and department chair. I’d offered my support to smooth any PR issues that might arise from my decision. I offered to continue mentoring the graduate students who wanted to continue to work with me. I even tendered my resignation early to support the program’s efforts to start recruiting my replacement.

For a while, it went well. But eventually, colleagues from other institutions started reaching out to me. How are you doing? I heard that they aren’t treating you well. I went out of my way to assure people that all was well and that my colleagues were supportive of my new direction. But despite my efforts, the rumor mill kept churning. The relationship with my colleagues chilled. I started facing ridiculous hurdles as I tried to carry out my responsibilities. First, I wasn’t given a parking permit. Then, my spring class wasn’t given a classroom (after multiple complaints, I was assigned a location so inappropriate that one of my students hosted us in her apartment instead).

Eventually, several Black female colleagues reached out to me. One, a colleague from a nearby university, was in my building when she’d overheard my department chair saying that he wouldn’t lift a finger to help me even if I were dying (he hadn’t imagined that the Black woman in the elevator was a faculty member who knew me). Another, a highly respected senior colleague new to our institution, warned me that she’d been in a meeting where my area head spoke about me with a level of vitriol she had never seen before. Then I got a call from a Black woman who’d left a year before I was hired. “Be careful,” she said, “they turn on you when you decide to leave.”

Leaving is not always a clean and simple act, even when it’s part of natural design. The transition to autumn begins beautifully, with leaves changing colors and sunny temperate weather. But it ends with a mess: layers of dying, rotting leaves make paths slippery and are a pain to clean up. Leaves don’t fall neatly into place; they spread everywhere - porches, patios, and gutters. They cling to the bottom of our shoes and end up in our homes. They mold and trigger our allergies. Sure, they can be used for compost and mulch. They can help promote the growth of new life. But in the process, they make a mess, a mess that we have to attend to in some way or another, even if it’s just being extra careful as we tread over them.

The leaving process for humans can be even messier, no matter how prayerful and diplomatic we might be. When we decide to leave a job, a church, or a relationship, it can give rise to an emotionally charged situation. We have to grapple with feelings of grief, guilt, shame, sadness, and anger, along with our excitement about what comes next. It’s especially hard if we had hoped for a lifetime (or at least, working lifetime) of relationship. It took me nearly two years to mourn my last job, two years to work through the grief over lost relationships, the anger over how I was treated, and the disappointment over what might have been.

The feelings that we are forced to confront are not always our own. When we leave, we shatter other people’s expectations of who they want us to be and the part we might play in their future. We inconvenience them when they have to step up to fill the hole we leave or when they have to start a new recruitment process. We embarrass them when our leaving suggests to others that they have failed in some way. The people and institutions we leave behind can react to our decision with a mixture of behaviors, ranging from supportive to retaliatory. Those behaviors are not neutral; they are impacted by White supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and ableism as well as institutional and interpersonal power. Like decaying, moldy leaves, they can create an awful, toxic mess, with detrimental effects that linger well after we have left

Sometimes we are simply the convenient scapegoat for other people’s feelings. Eventually, I would realize that I was one of five faculty leaving a 40-member department that academic year. The others were White men (including one who was also making an intra-institutional move) and two senior White women who had long established themselves as leaders in the field. The department could not lash out at them without suffering some consequences. As a Black woman and the most junior member of the faculty, I bore the brunt of the department’s anger at five people. It was brutal. Their retaliation ultimately resulted in me being black-balled and losing the grant altogether. It took more than a decade to recover from the financial impact.

We can take all the steps possible to make leaving as smooth as possible. We can pray, seek wise counsel, work through our issues with a therapist, wrap up outstanding commitments to the person or institution, develop transition plans, and communicate openly. But even the best laid plans cannot control the emotional and behavioral responses of others. Sometimes leaving creates a mess that takes a long time to clear up. Even then, it may just be the mess on our side that gets cleaned.

Here are a few tips if you find yourself in a messy leaving situation.

1. Embrace Your Emotions: It’s normal to feel a wide range of feelings when leaving, whether the situation has been supportive or toxic. Give yourself permission to feel all the feels: grief, anxiety, betrayal, abandonment, relief, celebration. Accept that it will take time to work through negative emotions or any negative impact to your self-esteem. When the negative feelings arise, ask yourself what you need. Be gentle with and compassionate toward yourself.

2. Resist the Shame Spiral: Messy leaving can trigger spirals of guilt and shame that make us believe that we are at fault. And when we’ve been in toxic situations, the people we leave behind will often attack our competence and integrity in an effort to protect themselves from any criticism that our departure might raise (either from us or from others). This can silence us and make us withdraw. Resist giving into the lie the shame tells us. Recall who you were outside of that context and before the backlash. Remember that you didn’t suddenly lose your giftedness when you arrived there.

3. Seek Support: You don’t have to go it alone. Seek support from friends, family, and colleagues. You might be surprised where you might find affirmation and reassurance. You might also discover that you are not the first to be mistreated by the institution. If the negative feelings are intense and cause disruptions in your sleep, appetite, productivity, or relationships, seek help from a therapist or support group.

Leaving is rarely a straightforward, clean-cut process. It's often accompanied by emotional turmoil, broken relationships, and institutional crisis. However, it's through these messy endings that we can find the potential for growth, transformation, and new beginnings. Take care of yourself amidst the chaos, learn from the messiness, and look forward to the possibilities that await on the other side of leaving.

Coming Up

Next week I’ll conclude this series on the lessons of fall with a guided meditation on letting go and embracing change. Be sure to follow me on the Insight Timer app or subscribe to Meditating with Dr. Chanequa on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify. And I’d appreciate it if you’d leave me a 5-star review!

News & Updates

I’m delighted to have Sacred Self-Care included in the “New & Noteworthy” section of Sojourners magazine.