my battle

These last few months have left me thinking really hard about my future. The time has come to make a commitment about my career and start looking for the "next place." Though in my heart I have know, for a while, that I want to become a surgeon, my biggest struggle has been to accept that I can actually do it. I have a great fear that I won't be good enough. Where that fear is founded, I'm not sure, but it's there and I have had a tough time trying to get over it. I haven't been really able to talk about it because I feel that it's repetitive and that I am just being too dramatic.

The thing is that it is the only thing on my mind is what the hell am I going to do about wanting to be a surgeon. Dear lord, it is the scariest thing in the entire world. Wanting to be a surgeon scares me more than when I moved here. It scares me because what if I am wrong. What if I fail? What if I'm not good? What if I can't do it? AHHHH!! Seriously, I wish I could feel that someone understood. I wish that I could eloquently articulate my fears and I wish I knew what I wanted to hear. When I came to New York I felt like I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Ok, maybe that's not exactly true. I was scared like nobody's business. I was at the top of my game at the end of college and was academically ready to move on to bigger and better things. Maybe, I wasn't that ready personally and emotionally, but, whatever, I was going to do it anyways. And this place was it. It was the place to grow up, to find myself, to find my future, to build on my hard work. But like I have said many times before, that hasn't gone so well in my eyes. I feel broken, I feel out-of-control, I feel confused.

I hear that growing up is painful and it happens whether or not you want it to happen. So fine, I'll accept that I've grown, blah, blah, blah. Other than the fact that this sucks, is that it doesn't make me feel any stronger or more insightful about what the hell I am going to do about wanting to be a surgeon. One of my best friends told me, "if you aren't working to be a great surgeon, why are you there at all?" It has her attempt to shock me into seeing how silly I was being and it worked for 0.002 seconds. Telling me that things are going to be fine or telling me that if I am not going to work hard enough then to just give up or telling me that sometimes you can't have what you want....yeah, none of those things help.

We talked about my fears and why I just didn't do something real about it. She then went on to tell me that I what I really needed was real help. And that knowing me, I wasn't one to ask for help. We all know she's right. Her next question was interesting...she asked, "what is more important to you, your pride or your self-confidence?" To me that sounded like-if you want to regain your self-confidence and work on those things that scare you, then you need to ask for help. But your pride is getting in the way, so you need to make decision about setting your pride aside for a while and get some help. Half a heart beat later I said, "my pride." That's me. That was me before I got here and it's all I got left. A part of me says that if I let go of my pride and don't try to do this alone, then I'll have lost all that remains of who I was. Another part of me says that pride is bad and that is the last thing that needs to go before I can really grow up and start to make real changes and embrace the new things in my life.

So that's it...I think I want to be a surgeon, but it scares me!! A lot. Mostly because I don't want to make the biggest mistake of my life. And I can't look at people I don't know in the eye and say I want to be a surgeon. It's easy to say it when I'm surrounded by people who love me and support me, but it's another thing to say it to strangers. They say the same things...are you sure? can you live that kind of lifestyle? what happens when you want to have a family, kids? can you go on such little sleep? can you work with that type of personality? And my friends say kidding...it was nice knowing you, we will miss you. you are going to be living in a different world than the rest of us. And it goes on and on. The doubts, about me, about my choices, about the future. My doubts. My battle, my struggle, to understand myself, to understand who I am, and who I want to be, is mostly to be ok with all of those things.