Hardness

This is hard. So much harder than I thought it would be. I truly believed that I was going to enjoy studying for the boards. I had visions of studying for 8 hours a day, and then going home to cook dinner, run, play frisbee, watch movies, read a book, play guitar, languish in long philosophical conversations with friends over wine or beer. This was going to be the beginning of reclaiming just a little tiny bit of my life back. I was going to be able to start being that person I used to be, or that person I really, really want to be. So innocent, so naive.

Turns out this is hard. It’s not that the 8 hours has turned into 10 and 12 hours. It’s not that I’m (not surprisingly) so much less productive and efficient than I imagined myself being. It’s not even that I am finding relearning this stuff less interesting than I had hoped. It’s the hopelessness. It’s the reality that I will spend my next 3 weeks studying all of the time only to start working 100 hours a week. Sure, it is doing something I want to do (or that I willingly signed up to do), but it’s actually that much further from being able to shape my life into something that feels more manageable, more bearable, more me.

Roughly two weeks ago I had a conversation with a colleague. Not a friend, but a classmate I know from before I even started at UW. Back then, he was making the same decision between schools as I was and we conversed a bit through email about the decision. Without knowing each other’s names, we exchanged pertinent personal background data and gave each other tips/insight into our “difficult” decision. I had a symbolic crush on him – he seemed so thoughtful, so smart, so interesting, so passionate. . .to me he was exemplary of the world I was about to enter – endless possibility, life changing, completely engaging, and the future source of my most meaningful friendships and, hopefully, lifelong partner. He remains symbolic to me because he, like so much of this experience, has been vastly different than what I expected. Almost the personification of this school, I find him subtly deceptive and frequently the bearer of cold truth. I don’t dislike him, but I am wary around him. We were at baseball game and as we walked out, we started some uncomfortable small talk about the end of the year and how great it felt and how we can’t wait until we get to start “what we really came here for.” I mentioned how nice it was to have some free time. He laughed almost ominously, “It’s nice,” he said “that we get a transition. That we get to slowly move from our old lives to this new one. That we have 2 years to adjust to being busy all the time, to never having enough time to ourselves, two years to become doctors. I don’t think I could do it overnight.”

There is a good deal of talk in medical school about becoming a doctor. We talk about the privileges and the responsibilities. We talk about the changes and the sacrifices. We talk about what it means to our family, what it means to our communities, and what it means to the greater world around us. And we talk about what it means to us. My colleague, the bearer of realities I’d rather ignore, seems to have equated becoming a doctor with sacrifice of self. I’m not sure he would describe it that way, but I think he will thrive on denying himself to serve his profession. I think he is excited about that (and in some ways, what an easy way to live .. if you know that your work is the most important thing, decisions are essentially made for you).

At this point I am far from sure about what becoming a doctor means to me. Truth is, I think I’ve been (and continue to be) in a bit of a denial about how much this process will change me. A good piece of me still believes that when I am done with these eight years, I will just return to the life that I lived before. I will have this skill when I am done, and with it I will simply slip back into the life I’ve put on hold. Intellectually I know that this is unlikely and emotionally I am beginning to realize that no matter how I resist, I will finish this 8-year process a completely different person. Obviously 8 years doing anything changes someone. I think what I have been fighting (tooth and nail) is the rather obvious idea that this process is going to change me in ways different than if I’d done something else for the next 8 years. What I think I am uncomfortable with is that there is a prescribed change that I have to go through so that I can become this doctor person. It seems like I will no longer be able to hand pick the changes I want to move through and ignore those that I dislike.

It’s a funny feeling to no longer be in control of the direction of my growth. It takes a huge amount of trust in my elders (something I am terrible at) and an even larger amount of faith that this will all turn out alright in the end. For me that faith has always been patchy at best: I did not enter this process knowing, without a doubt that I want to be (was meant to be) a doctor. I hemmed and hawed over 6 years; I weighed options, made lists of pros and cons, and, in the end, going to med school had a slight edge over the other options. I understood it as a process, one more adventure. And I suppose I still see it as that, on some level. I think the gravity of what I don’t know coupled with the unabashed expectation that this become a lifestyle has given this journey some weight. I must travel more slowly, more deliberately, more thoughtfully. Lately I do so looking backwards at what I have left behind or left and right at what I am missing. At some point I should probably do a turn around in my head and refocus my attention. I’m sure it would change the sensation I have of being swept up by things I have no control over. I’m just not quite sure how to get there, especially when I feel so empty of the doctor faith that is supposed to drag me through this.

Retreat

It's been a while, I know. . .and lots has happened and not very much has happened. I'm spending the week out on Orcas Island studying - a retreat away from the distraction that was the city. I have no internet or phone service at the house, and that is conducive to wholesome things like studying, playing guitar, and writing. The writing seems to be a bit more. . .well, reflective, contemplative, heavy, and maybe a little long, but I guess that's where I'm at these days. And I think the way that this whole blog thing works is that I post what I want to post and you read what you want to read. Or something like that.