I quit.

I have not been on here much, the last couple of months. It’s not been because I have had nothing to write about – quite the opposite. The difficult part about maintaining a blog focused on climbing, travel and adventure is that I end up spending an awful lot of time actually having those experiences, then struggling to find the time to write about them before the next climb, the next trip creeps up.

This summer has been particularly short on the writing. Part of that has been the inevitable lure of summer, the dry weather and long days tempting me outside at all hours, as many days a week as possible. Part of it, however, has been due to me and my partner gearing up to take on a great big new step in our lives. An announcement like that in your 30s is often followed by a close up of a sparkly rock or a photo of a sonogram, but we’ve never been ones to follow trends. We’ve gone the opposite direction – we’re abandoning all our responsibilities. We’ve found lodgers and quit our jobs.¹ We’ll be spending the next month condensing all our belongings into a van, tying up our loose ends, and will be spending most of the next year following the good climbing conditions and trying to calculate 90 days in every 180 days to make sure we don’t go over our Schengen allowance.² It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a really long time, and recent events in our personal lives have made us think – if not now, when?

Research scientist to professional dirtbag

Last Thursday was my last day at work. Friday was my first day not in full-time employment or education (or both) since I was five years old. Predictably, I went climbing. As someone who used to be driven by almost exclusively career-focused ambition, who spent 80% of my 20s shut up in a laboratory, this is wild. Everything I did was geared towards becoming the top of my field. I knew exactly which degree I wanted to do at which university (Microbiology with Industrial Experience at Manchester), what I wanted to do afterwards (a PhD in virology) and where I wanted to end up (a prestigious laboratory, working on viruses or vaccines), working towards my own research group or a lecturing position. I was so hyperfocused. I was in the lab nights, evenings, weekends and I achieved it all. By the time I was 30, I had, on paper gotten everything I wanted. I had worked and studied in a few of the most prestigious institutes in the country, I had a permanent lecturer position and was beginning to develop my own independent research project. And I hated it. I was miserable, overworked and burnt out.

In 2022, I left academia, after ten soul-destroying years researching and teaching virology and immunology to become a science writer. Despite the prestige and the exciting research, I’d had a run of bad luck with dead-end projects, indifferent students and toxic supervisors that had had gradually ground down my passion for science and my mental health. Leaving the academic environment should have been an easy choice, but I still struggled to make the leap, not because of money, or location, or the things I’d miss. The barrier was the huge amount of self-worth I’d attached to my job title.

Whether we like it or not our jobs become significant parts of our identities and define our place in the social hierarchy. “What do you do?” is often one of the first questions you get asked when meeting someone new. “Research Scientist” was an impressive title, that communicated that my work was meaningful and improving lives. I was developing vaccines for neglected tropical diseases, then investigating how to improve the immunological components of breast milk for at-risk premature babies. “Science Writer” didn’t really pack the same punch (especially when I inevitably had to explain what a science writer was), but by focusing on what I no longer was, it took me that much longer to recover from my burnout and my experiences in academia. In a world that values our labour above all else, I had to quit defining my worth by a job and a field that was destroying me. I focused instead on what I could do. I dove into my hobbies, my social life, my climbing – my passions outside of my paid labour. The proportion of my identity that my job took up got smaller and smaller, until the idea of taking a career break didn’t seem such a big, scary thing. How could it, when I would have so many other things with which to fill and enrich my life? When I was so much more than a “Scientist”?

It took me more than two years to fully recover from burnout. Even then I wasn’t fully divorced from the worthiness that academia brought with it. When asked that all important “What do you do?” question, I would often respond with “Well, I used to be a scientist/lecturer…” Still, after that time I could feel myself straining at the seams of my seemingly cushy job – working from home was great, but I am ultimately an extrovert and I needed to be outside and around other people. I struggled to stay motivated. As much as I love writing, I need to balance the time spent hunched in a dim room over my laptop with time in wide open spaces, with the sun on my face and laughter of friends in my ears. The dream of taking a break, travelling, focusing on climbing became more and more tempting, but also more and more like a reasonable suggestion.

The more I got to know myself outside of science, the more I realised that it I had no interest in the social norms and milestones I was expected to hit. The idea of nice cars and big houses financed up to the eyeballs filled me with dread. I have never wanted children or been interested in marriage, and pets are great fun, when they’re someone else’s. I didn’t even want the high powered career really. I had dedicated myself to my career because I am driven to be the best I can possibly be can be at the things I’m passionate about. Once I fell out of love with science, I had to fill that need with something else: climbing. The more I fell in love with climbing, the more I wanted to simplify the rest of my life, to make it my focus. Those norms I had never been interested in fell further and further behind in my rearview mirror. I didn’t want stuff, or things, I just wanted to be, on rock. Gradually, the the leap from “Science Writer” to “Dirtbag” became less and less intimidating.³

So, this summer, we decided to take the leap. We’re lucky enough to have a bit of savings, no dependents, and we’re of an age where our parents don’t yet rely on us. When would there ever be a better time? I have never taken a break before. I have never made myself the focus rather than my career. I’m doing it now to not only do what I love for a little while, but also decide what I want to do next. Wherever my career leads, I don’t think it’s life sciences. This in itself is far more scary than being unemployed by choice. I have been locked on to the target of a career in science since I was 16 years old, I’ve built my life, my identity around it. Throwing that all in to do something potentially completely different, to start from scratch, is almost overwhelming, but ultimately, I hope, worth it.

With an increased focus on climbing, must come an increased focus on rest days, otherwise our dreams could be dashed on the rocks of overuse injuries before they’ve even left the harbour. I hope to spend those gorgeously free and empty days writing to my heart’s content, so hopefully I’ll manage to post on here more frequently than once a month, and maybe even with some sort of posting structure.

One last thing to consider: When asked what I do now, what should I answer?

If you’d like to keep up with all the rocks I hope to touch, please consider subscribing.

I don’t like paywalls and I don’t drink coffee, but if you like my work and would like to show some appreciation, perhaps you would like instead to…

I get through an awful lot of it.

No AI tools have ever or will ever be used to write or help write this blog.

1. Well, I have – Chris is self employed so he doesn’t exactly need to hand his resignation in to anyone, expect maybe himself, in the mirror. ↩︎
2. Thanks Brexit ↩︎
3. In the climbing world, a dirtbag is someone who has given up the typical norms of a house, creature comforts and a steady job to devote their lives to climbing, probably living out of a vehicle and taking on work as needed. This is the dream of the majority of climbers. ↩︎