A shrill bleeping drags me into consciousness; it blasts into the black quicksand of my dreams and pulls me up into the harsh antiseptic glare of my life - filled with deadlines, demands, pressures, goals that I’m not certain I even want. I’m so rushed, overworked, I don’t know how I even got to this point. Were the decisions mine? Were they simply what I thought was expected of me? And, if so, expected by whom?
Mechanically I dress, grab my bag, my stethoscope, an apple to eat in the car on the way to the hospital. I don’t feel human. I’ve forgotten how to enjoy myself. My life has become an endless list of duties and none seem meaningful. I’m now some kind of android. Mechanical. Emotionally numb. A cog in the industrial machine, stretched taut against a horizon over which my endlessly ambitions recede. And deep down I know the sad truth: I don’t really want to reach the goals on this road. They bore me, stress me, don’t resonate with who I am (not that I’m sure who that is yet) and I hate them. I’m wasting my time and my youth. I'm throwing my life away. I know it. I wonder how many more years I’ll continue on this path before I have the courage to leave.
I continue on, driving through the rain which billows down in rattling sheets over the dark, wet roads. My windscreen wipers cut an arch in the droplets over the glass, relentlessly ticking away time. They mock me. Tick, tick, clip, clip, drip, drip. My youth is being cut away by time; it drips from the car and washes into the gutters, disappearing in my rear mirror. And on I go, following the beam of light cast by the headlights, which forge a warm glowing tunnel through the cold July mist. And, along the banks of this gushing river of lights, I admire the graceful dark limbs of barren winter trees reaching to the heavens. They soften the harshness of the artificial concrete and metal landscape, creating a calming natural oasis.
Meanwhile, traffic swells and swirls in sweeping currents all around. These are my fellow life-travellers: I wonder, in this moment, if any of them are on a wrong road like me? If so, do they know it? Can they change? Will they have the courage to jump? Will I? Yet, maybe there are no ‘wrong’ roads. Maybe even the detours of life - off the major freeways which carry us most expeditiously to our hoped for destinations – are right and necessary to equip us with skills we’ll only understand later. Skills which will help us navigate and stay afloat during life’s storms, when waters become treacherous and difficult. Then it will all make sense. I hope so.
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(PS: In my life, years later I was glad of those difficult Hospital Registrar years, because they gave me the tools needed to help my daughter recover from an incredibly severe case of Anorexia Nervosa - from which she suffered for ten years, with five as an in-patient).
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