Lately I’ve been thinking about the summer before medical school, circa 2014. Not filtered by regret but with intrepid curiosity. I seek answers.
Knowing I never wanted to be a doctor—eight years of evidence in the rearview—I must have wanted something, instead. It’s Newtonian; every action creates an equal and opposition reaction. Something pressed against medicine… what was it? The void my medicine choice created, and the consequential vacuum yanking me from it, was produced by this. I know it. Encouraged by the Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham, I wondered, what was (is) this force?
I know a few things about me during that summer; I wanted an opportunity, I wanted growth, I wanted space, and I wanted meaning.
Opportunity. Growth. Space. Meaning.
During that summer and the years prior, while working my first job after college (experience discussed previously), life functioned as my chisel, chipping and shaping, slowly, who I was. I watched my identity appear from the ether, daily. While at the steering wheel, being it was my life, the process’s arch seemed out of my hands. My only job was to stay present, stay in tune, and stay me. Listen and watch. Act and become.
When the time arrived for my medical school decision, all I wanted was to continue doing that. My statue was taking shape but far from whole. I was proof of concept, not product. Idea, not art.
This is where I got confused, thinking it feasible to continue that while failing to own my wants.
It’s hard to rationalize why that process was so important, compared to medicine’s prestige and six-figure guarantees, but to risk that for fear, money, or security, is the biggest mistake we make. I lived it, so I attest it. When you give up that, you lose… you.
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I went to medical school and grew as a person, no doubt. I became a professional. I developed work ethic. I gained appreciation for the body’s complexity. Residency was defining, too. I became more empathic. I learned how to conflict. I became a physician. But, through both of these chapters, my statue froze, and my chisel remained out of reach. Walking into the ether, I could only look back. Wondering, where did I go?
So, when I quit my job last fall, I had in my sights exactly what I wanted: that. Opportunity. Growth. Space. Meaning.
Since, keeping that chisel chiseling has been challenging. I find the struggle exceedingly worth it though, for the little things, like the morning’s first waft of coffee. Or the way my wife’s hand feels in my hand. Or the consistent excitement I feel about the future, once again.
These things, never absent but for awhile obscured, are back. Because I am back. And they define who I am, daily, one step at a time into the ether.
So, what did (do) I want? That, the endless discovery of who I am.
(Photo Caption: Somewhere in Arkansas, a month into medical school, wondering where that went. Courtesy of Red Dirt Ruminations.)
I had similar feelings about my music when I went to medical school. I really wanted to be a recording artist when I was in high school and undergrad, but I chose to pursue medicine because it was more stable than music as a career. Medical education gradually and completely squeezed almost all of the music out of my life, and I remember the sad day during residency when I realized that I was never going to finish recording my album.
If you had told me years before that I would let someday let something else eclipse my music, I would not have believed you. I felt like I was throwing grandma’s piano off of the wagon in the middle of the trek west, a necessary sacrifice for my survival.
Was it worth it to pay so high a price? It was, because medical education is a journey of becoming, and I was becoming something that I wanted to be. I still love medicine. And once I made it through the doctor factory mostly intact, I could choose to add back into my life all of the things I had thrown off the wagon along the way, including my music. Now I can record music as a wonderful hobby, and if I wanted to make it a side gig I probably could. This satisfies the creative side of my soul. I also have the stability of my awesome day job and its salary to pay the bills.
Of course my journey is different from yours, but I wanted to point out that even those of us who stick with medicine feel much the same way about things we leave behind during our education.
I really appreciate this. The sacrifice, of music’s role at the time, was necessary because you wanted medicine. And it’s reemerged on the other side. The two now inform the other. That’s what I always hoped would happen, just lacked the “wanting it” aspect.