To really change, I don’t think it’s possible without hitting rock bottom. For me, it was imperative. I needed a humbling. I needed to feel the earth beneath my bare skin. I needed to lose everything.
From rock bottom, I needed to have no choice.
Sometimes I get asked, “Why don’t you just start a therapy practice part-time while you continue doing all the stuff you’re doing now?” It’s a reasonable enough question. But at a point, one must stop being reasonable with their life. For all of reasonability’s merits, it got me eight years of life doing something I never wanted to do. On the other hand, if what you want to do doesn’t feel a little crazy and a little unreasonable, it’s probably not what you really want.
I sense when questions like these are asked, the real request is for me to return to medicine so that the person asking the question doesn’t have to figure out their life either. Then we can both be lost and miserable together! But to the specific question above, I had already tried the work-part-time-and-figure-out-how-to-be-happy-in-my-spare-time plan. It was so reasonable I became depressed, again.
Believe me, if there was a viable route to staying in medicine, I exhausted that search, and for all that work, I never could find it.
Why? Because that life was never mine. It wasn’t me. And if I wasn’t me, could I exist?
In Rounders, my favorite movie, there’s a scene where Mike (Matt Damon) is seeking advice from his older mentor Professor Petrovsky (Martin Landau). Mike is on the precipice of committing to who he really is (a poker player), but part of him believes he can still make it as a law student, keep his law-student girlfriend, and avoid playing poker. In their conversation, Mike asks Petrovsky— Petrovsky had just revealed that in his own journey to choose a life that was his, as an attorney, and not the life his parents wanted for him, as a rabbi, his parents disowned him and never spoke to him again—“If you had it to do all over again, knowing what would happen, would you make the same choice?”
Petrovsky says, “What choice?”
A blessing from my time in medicine was the realization that I could not lie to myself and survive. I tried, in all manner of falsehood, to convince myself that I could figure out how to be a physician and be happy. I told myself that I didn’t have to listen to my soul. I chose the reasonable path and went to medical school, until along that forsaken path, I ran out of road. There, I met the unreasonable truth: the only choice I had was to be who I was.
Thankfully, there was no other choice; if there had been, I would have taken it.
This week, my new book 32 Lessons from 8 Years Lost in Medicine released on Amazon. If you’d like to buy a copy, here’s a link.
(Photo Caption: my last photo ID as a physician, taken a week before I met the truth at the end of the road. If that was the alternative, truly, I had no choice.)
