I went "straight through" from college to med school to residency and the training highway is ending. Phew! I can choose to do whatever I want with my time! What? How?
Medical school and training was kind of all-encompassing for me, in that whenever I wasn't studying I felt like I should be studying, even when I wasn't necessarily enthusiastic about certain rotations I still had to show enthusiasm as a medical student, and whenever I wasn't seeing patients I was still reading all the time, thinking about my patients, writing notes or manuscripts. It took a lot of work and energy to get to where I am today. I love my job and the perspective on humanity my training has given me. But I also put off a lot of other interests - I did maintain them to some degree, but I wasn't really able to produce any substantial amount of creative work because I just didn't have the mental space or energy or time. I did not feel free to take some intellectual risks because medicine is a rather failure-adverse field. I attended one of those schools where everybody does something very impressive and shiny-sounding. I feel like everything I did, while existing in the space of medical training, had this component of "how will it look on a CV?" or "what doors will this open up?" Even though I did enjoy most of these activities, I never did anything that was 100% divorced from that value system. Even the freaking poetry I wrote that ended up winning a prize ended up on my resume at some point.
The end of training is the first time in my adult life where I can choose to do whatever I want with my time (and the rest of my life!). I'm not tied to grades or training obligations. It was for this reason that I ultimately did not choose to do a fellowship (more training), despite really enjoying that particular subspecialty and considering it seriously for my career, because I felt like it would be the "default" thing to do, to take that choice of how to spend my time/energy out of my hands again, and to stay within the comfortable familiarity of the academic training treadmill. I look at other research fellowships and prizes available to young, motivated, and highly trained people like myself, and reflect that over the years, I have learned to paint myself as a desirable candidate to those fellowships, but I also know that at this point pursuing one would do little to further my own understanding of myself and how to live a good and meaningful life. I love my work, find it fascinating, and care about doing a good job, but I'm not sure if loving my job means that I need to devote my all to my career. I don't think my job is taking over my identity, but I do feel like there is a risk of that happening if I don't pause and reflect on what I'm doing.
I am also nervous to leave the academic training bubble... my mentors are mostly people who have been in academia their whole lives. I can't tell if I'm walking away from something that I'd be insane to walk away from - like, what becoming a professor of x medical specialty at Ivory Tower Institution is the best job out there? I don't know. I ask because realistically, that's the main thing that my training has given me the opportunity to do - if I wanted to become a community doctor, I definitely did not need this academic pedigree. I feel like I could conceivably be interested in returning to academia later (if it's possible), but I can't will myself to continue in this system without understanding what the alternatives are, because without that understanding, I'd be "defaulting into" academia rather than actively choosing it.
I work in what is considered a "lifestyle" field so I have flexible hours and a good job market. My hunch is that I would be happy if I could work in medicine in such a way that I could also carve out time and space to work on creative pursuits. I'm nervous though, because I've never actually incorporated creative pursuits into my life in a systematic or sustained way since I've been in school/training for my entire life, and I'm afraid that I could leave my academic nest and then also be stuck at a non-academic job (I've heard they are higher-paying but also can be more of a grind) and have no infrastructure or roadmap to actually go forth and pursue my creative hobbies. What if medical training has really squeezed out all the creativity in me?
What do I need to do to move forward in my life? What steps can I take to transition to this new freedom, and to start to pursue my hobbies? Has anybody else has been in this kind of situation, maybe went through an intense time in training or school, had a type of all-encompassing career or a type of career in which many of their peers work very intensely, and then re-defined things for themselves? Anybody ever leave academia or academic medicine and come running back, or spend some years as an attending before returning to a fellowship?
I am kind of like this previous askme about being a doctor and having no life, except I don't feel burned out at my job, just maybe a little cynical about the rat race and the parts of me that I put on hold to get here. |
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