My self.
Once it was lost, I was willing to sacrifice everything to get it back. And good thing too, because everything was always the self’s price.
Monday, I stumbled across Ernest Wolf’s take on the self. Frozen by its power, I read it again and again from its unmoving page in my left hand.
“Among its core attributes, the self is the center of initiative, recipient of impressions, and repository of that individual’s particular constellation of nuclear ambitions, ideals, talents, and skills. These motivate and permit it to function as a self-propelling, self-directed, and self-sustaining unit, which provides a central purpose to the personality and gives a sense of meaning to a person’s life. The patterns of ambitions, skills, and goals, the tensions between them, the program of action they create, and the resultant activities that shape the individual’s life are all experienced as continuous in space and time and give the person a sense of selfhood as an independent center of initiative and independent center of impressions.”
As I sat before my therapist, during those last two years of residency, I repeatedly fessed, “All I want is to feel like myself again.” At this familiar admission, my therapist would lean back in her chair, take a reflective inhale, and nod knowingly with glistening eyes. There wasn’t much more to say, nor was there anything more important to want.
It just took me six years to want it bad enough.
Before arriving onto my therapist’s couch, I valued everything else more.
In going to medical school, I prioritized my family’s acceptance. In forgoing physicianhood, I truly believed their love was on the line. And being someone that loves my family dearly, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice that love… yet.
Every summer during medical school, I considered dropping out. Daily. Ultimately, I never would because I valued the security of medicine. Security mattered and was ensured, just as long as I stayed on the educational yellow-brick road. Once you’re in the medical school pipeline, you’re going to come out the other side. After hearing me complain about a course’s difficulty during second year, a medical school administrator pulled me to the side and whispered, “Ryan, we’re not in the business of failing students. The world needs doctors. We need to graduate doctors to get funding from the government. We will do anything to graduate all of our students.” What exactly that means for the quality of care provided to patients, I’ll let you read between the lines. But that is security. And for years, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice that security… yet.
Speaking of security, the money was blinding. And for a stretch, I lost my bearings inside its pull. With money, a trapdoor return into myself seemed possible. Surf trips. Vacations to Hawaii. New cars. Maybe I could engineer my happiness through a great work-life balance, working part-time and making $200K. For years, I couldn’t let go of money’s lure… yet.
Acceptance. Security. Money. My self.
As long as I prioritized everything else, I couldn’t know my self. Quoting Wolf, I was disconnected from “a sense of selfhood as an independent center of initiative”. And as the year’s went on, that’s what I missed the most. Myself.
As I look back, only eighteen months removed now, the peeling of the onion analogy works well. To earn back a sense of who I am, I had to surrender everything to get back what was at the onion’s center: wholeness. What was acceptance worth without a sense of who I was? What was money worth? Security?
Still, count me as a fan of getting lost to yourself. I couldn’t intimately understand the root of my vitality, until I’d lost it. If it weren’t for those chased illusions, I wouldn’t own this crystallization of knowing: there’s just nothing worth sacrificing who you are… unless it’s a part of your long-winding journey back to wholeness because that journey back is pretty damn rewarding.
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