I recently had the chance to talk with Daniel Fincke on his Patheos.com blog, “Camels with Hammers,” about the general struggle of finding a postacademic career, and the upcoming Beyond the Professoriate online conference:
Working as a professor is most often referred to as being a professor. Your identity becomes wrapped up in what you do. When you face the prospect of not being able to do what you are, that can be a real crisis. It requires a process of disentangling who you are from what you do. You have to get at the roots of what you do and then seek out places in the world where you might practice those things, though the context in which you do so may be very different from what you’re used to!
Read more here.