END OF BST 2
END OF BST II
Coming back from Ecuador, I found myself facing a few more crossroads in my life. For once, the uncertainty didn’t scare me. One thing I knew for certain was that I was excited about all of it.
First up would be the interview for an HST post. Two years after returning from my gap year, I remained just as resolute about pursuing a career in emergency medicine as I had been back then. If anything, my passion burned brighter than ever. The more I learnt, the better I felt I was becoming at my job, and that feeling alone kept pushing me to improve. That said, medicine was still just a job. And I don’t mean that dismissively – it’s a job I love, one that challenges me, fascinates me and gives me a sense of purpose. But it’s not, and could never be, the entirety of who I am.
But for now, my career had to take the centre stage. As an HST, the pressure would only increase. I would take on much more responsibility in the department, lead more resuscitations, oversee an entire area, review junior colleagues and contribute more to teaching. Alongside that would come the same academic obligations I had dealt with as a BST, only at a higher level: e-portfolio requirements, assessments, examinations, quality-improvement projects and journal clubs. The supposed glamour of the promotion might ultimately amount to little more than a fancier title and a modest pay rise.
Still, that was the price of becoming a specialist, and becoming a specialist remained the goal. What I was less certain about was the kind of person I wanted to become alongside it.
The Journey Inward
Medicine aside, I felt like my personal life was all over and that I had a lot of uncertainty to deal with. My instinct had always been to answer such uncertainty by adding something new. More travelling, more skills to practice, more things to learn… There were so many things waiting to be discovered, and I had made it a point never to allow myself to get bored.
None of that was inherently wrong. Travel, medicine, diving, writing and everything else I pursued had given me an extraordinarily rich life. However, I had begun to wonder whether I sometimes expected too much from them. There was always another exam to pass, another country to explore or another version of myself to become. I had become very good at moving forward, but I was less used to staying still. Being on the go gave me direction, achievement reassured me that I was progressing, and intensity made me feel alive.
But over the previous year, there were times when even intensity and adventure felt somewhat stale. My immediate reaction had been to wonder whether I needed to travel differently, go farther or find something more intense. Perhaps, however, that emptiness had not been telling me to find a bigger life. Perhaps it had been asking me to pay closer attention to the one I already had. The next journey, perhaps, would possibly take me to an inward one. That didn’t mean abandoning adventure. It meant learning the difference between moving towards curiosity and moving away from discomfort, between feeling alive and merely feeling stimulated. Could I allow an ordinary day to be meaningful without making it memorable? Could I sit with uncertainty without immediately turning it into a plan?
The irony was that I could easily turn introspection into yet another self-improvement project. This would require the opposite: less doing and more noticing. Perhaps that would be my real upcoming challenge. Balance would not mean squeezing medicine, travel, writing, relationships and countless new pursuits into the same overcrowded calendar. It would mean leaving enough unoccupied space to understand what I genuinely wanted from them.
Medicine could not be allowed to claim every free hour, but neither did every hour saved from medicine need to be filled with something extraordinary. Some of it could simply be lived. All I could do was remain open, keep showing up and pay attention. The next journey might not take me any farther from home, it might just take me deeper into myself.