The below needs to be heavily prefaced with the fact that a Churchill Fellowship is a truly fantastic experience, and I am incredibly grateful – and consider myself very fortunate – for having had the opportunity to undertake one. You can tell there’s a “but” coming though, right?
Having been back for a few months, and having polished off my report (everything but the final design work), I’ve had some time to reflect on the experience. And the bit that I probably wasn’t all that well prepared for: The comedown.
I spent the best part of a year applying, going through the interview process, riding the elation of a successful application and burying myself in all the planning and preparation. After all that, I got to experience the prize of the experience: A couple of months, overseas, doing the Fellowship travel. For someone like me, a rank generalist who spends my work life (which is a lot of my ‘life life’) working across a broad range of issues and projects, this was a truly rare opportunity to focus my attention on a single topic that I am both interested in and passionate about.
The Fellowship is, in many ways, precisely that: A couple of months of travel to interesting (and often wonderful) places, meeting fascinating people who are both passionate about the same thing, and generally far more knowledgeable as well. It’s amazing. It opens your eyes, it opens your mind, and it inspires you.
I would’ve spent close to six months, evenings and weekends, planning for the trip. Reaching out to contacts and cold-calling and emailing people, talking with people over videoconference at odd hours in inconvenient time zones about my planned research, booking hotels, hire cars and train tickets. I spent approximately no time at all thinking about how I would handle coming back.
I don’t remember if this was spoken about as part of the Fellowship induction. (Even if it was, I was much too excited and filled with anticipation to be clear-eyed about what comes after.) The thing about life-changing opportunities is they change your life.
In the space of a couple of months I found myself more knowledgeable certainly, but also with a greater appreciation of how things could be, what is possible, and perhaps stronger views on how things should be. I had changed. Perhaps not dramatically, but enough that I noticed it. The reality I returned to though, had not. There’s a bit of existential whiplash incurred when you come back from something as exceptional as a Fellowship and return to full-time work – with the added bonus of the 10-week deadline to complete The Report.
I feel like there are a few things at play:
Grief: Just a touch. The amazing experience is in the rear-view. Even though I like my job, and where I live, and have a wonderful wife, my average day is not spent exclusively talking with subject-matter experts on the energy transition – let alone doing so whilst travelling across the globe. A Fellowship is long enough that you miss it when it’s done.
Frustration: Just because you come home with a bunch of great ideas doesn’t mean you’ll be able to implement any of them quickly. It also doesn’t mean that those around you – let alone the rest of society – who haven’t had the experience that you have, will immediately be on board with what you’re thinking either. Writing The Report provided a good opportunity to think about how to approach implementation – but I feel that of the entire Churchill experience, it is the hardest part, and will take years.
Mild PTSD: I’m not sure what else to call it. After the best part of 18 months living and breathing the Fellowship, I have emerged on the other side. I have my evenings and weekends back, and it leaves a hole. My wife, a doctor, has spoken to me a few times about the absence that comes with finishing medical training, and the sense of emptiness it can leave in its wake. (This essay on Post-exam Stockholm Syndrome speaks about it well). While I haven’t given the best part of a decade to this, as many medical professionals do, I can still see the similarities.
Climate Anxiety: Whilst I think the above trio could apply to just about anyone in this situation, there is a certain added risk that I feel comes with a topic like the energy transition. That is the fact that the more I seem to learn about it, and the associated climate change situation, the more frequently I find myself bummed out. I wrote about this a bit on my blog while I was travelling, and I’ve been meaning to update that post with some more examples – on both sides of the ledger. Since I started on the Churchill journey, I think about this a lot more, it fills my news feed and takes up a larger portion of my podcast library. While I’m not without hope, I find myself more often angry or concerned.
In wrapping this up, I should clarify that I am okay. I realised soon enough that my antidote to last couple of items is thinking about, and working on, the implementation piece. The Fellowship also continues to throw up new opportunities to share my findings and continue those conversations with fascinating people. In no way do I regret doing it. With the benefit of hindsight though, my big learning – and advice for anyone doing a Churchill Fellowship, or anything similar – is to spend at least some of the time that you are putting into what you might feel is the main event, thinking about the much bigger piece: what life might be like when you get back, and what you are going to do with your newfound knowledge and inspiration.