I know it's the traditional crisis after handing in your thesis, but I'm really unsure whether to stay in academia... I have my viva in January and I currently have a teaching fellowship until June 2016. In a sense there's no hurry to decide, but similarly, if I can just do my teaching and not feel pressured to write/publish etc. then that would be a weight off... but is this just exhaustion speaking? I have no time to take a break until Christmas...

If you jump off the tracks of academia, presumably it's really hard to get back on again...

I just see how stressed and overworked my colleagues are, working every evening and weekends, tons of admin. I don't even particularly enjoy the teaching side of things. I like research and writing. Perhaps I should just try to be a writer instead (though heaven knows how I'd be able to make any money doing that...)

Think it's entirely sensible to stake stock at this juncture. It's a big decision, and certainly having a PhD doesn't mean that you should automatically continue in academia.

I'm not sure whether I've just got writing up blues or whether academia has burnt me out before I've even reached the end of my PhD but I'm very much in the 'is academia for me?' boat at the moment.

I'd love to be able to do some post-doc work and expand on what I've done so far but as I progress (see: struggle) with writing up I'm beginning to have doubts in whether I can do it. The intellectual content of my work is well received and unless I greatly offend someone in the department over the next few months I should be able to count on their support to back bids for post-doc funding but writing has always been a struggle and its getting worse. Ultimately I don't want to lecture but feel that in the short-to-medium term research is what I'd like to give myself a good grounding in as I enjoy and I'm interested in that aspect.

Caught in two though - is my interest and motivation strong enough to power through how miserable the negatives make me? And if I leave is that the door shut behind me for good?