Since I finally decided to leave academia in September 2020 and finished making the necessary bureaucratic arrangement several months ago, I've received the following three different reactions to an announcement I've made about this rather fateful decison of mine to my friends as well as those (former) colleagues of mine I remained in touch with not only purely professionally:
- Encouragement and support
- "Threatening"
- Silence or formulaic wish of success
Since I wasn't sure how many of my friends would understand my decision, I can't thank enough those friends of mine who have been encouraging and supporting me morally. As for my former colleagues, I didn't expect them to understand me and thought many of them would simply walk away from me silently or just by wishing me success rather formulaically, which is what has actually happened. I don't feel sorry for this, nor do I blame them. I even find this reaction very easy to cope with - thus they've done me a great favor in a sense - as I know now very clearly that we don't have a common language any longer. Those few former colleagues of mine who haven't walked away from me this way are real treasures for me.
What still keeps perplexing me is the "threatening" by some of those I considered my friends. I thought they understood my situation as my motives for this decision of mine, so I naively expected them to encourage and support me, even passively. But what I've heard from them are such insensitive words like "Are you 100% sure of your success in your new career?" or even "You have no chance of success in your new career".
How can I be 100% sure? Do they take no action until they are 100% sure of its outcome? If so, I don't want to follow them as my possible role models. Actually, the biggest risk in life is to take no risk. I can now say that we can maximize our soul lessons, so to speak, by facing fear and taking action anyway.
This doesn't mean that I've completely got over my fear of uncertainty etc. So I find it very difficult to understand those (few) "friends" of mine who have decided to "threaten" me by saying that I have no chance of success. I'm not talking about constructive advice to recheck and recalculate the possible risk of this fateful change, which I've already done. I've been wondering what they can gain by "threatening" me this way. The only possible explanation I've been able to think of so far is that this way they are trying to "neutralize" the threat they feel, at least intuitively, by my action they themselves have never dared to take. Anyway I've decided to stay away from these toxic "frenemies".