How medicine has made me strong enough to leave medicine
TLDR it was not a waste of time.
My sister has been unemployed for the past two years after leaving her job in technology sales. She is now connected with all these people who either don’t work, work very little or who are not working at all. Her community sees the idea of forming an identity around your work as insane. They want to live a life where they explore their interests and align with their values.
I think about how different this is from people in medicine. In medicine, the idea that person wouldn’t want to spend all their time working is sacrosanct.
Selfish, childish, entitled, foolish, irresponsible, weak, and not cut out for medicine. These are some of the adjectives used by people in medicine to describe people who leave or cut down hours. I may be exaggerating a bit. Though I was called entitled by a peer when I asked to cut down from forty hours to thirty-two hours, so I suspect I’m not too far off.
Selfless, responsible, clear-minded, strong, and gritty. These are the adjectives for the people who stay in medicine. Being outside the matrix, I see this list and initially think it’s propaganda to get people to stay in a life-consuming job. However- strength, grittiness, and resilience- these are actually positive traits that can be utilized outside of medicine. In fact, I suspect they are traits that outside of medicine have exponential returns.
I remember in PA school our professors would always say they needed to break us down first before they build us up. Dramatic? Yes, but the resilience you develop from learning how to take in criticism is a skill. As a child, I was the little girl who would cry when told not to do something. Before medicine, I took everything personally. Now someone can insult me and I can see where their negative intentions may be coming from. In addition, I can remove the emotional charge and see the objective critique behind their judgment and decide if it is useful. It feels like a 180 degree shift from my childhood self.
If someone has grown, then they have learned something. With medicine, we can take the positives from what we have learned and let go of the egoicness. We don’t have to be seen as selfless martyrs or self-assured heroes. We can take the positives from the skills we have learned and use our powers for good. Using our powers for good, does not always look like helping people they way we do for our patients in medicine. Using our powers for good can mean having the confidence to pursue a life authentic to us. This could mean making time for your own health or your family. It could mean pursuing interests previously deemed impractical.
If we can bring forward our strengths and push away our perceived perceptions from others, we can harness the power of what we have learned to design a life thats in alignment with our values.
