Thoughts from the Outside

I’ve never been away from the medical, scientific world for this long. It started in tenth grade with gross anatomy and lab research and didn’t stop until last July: a steady stream of problem sets, write-ups, standardized tests, patient presentations, clinic notes, journal clubs, and one match after another. We lived in urban places among people who were also all in medicine, or at least equally engrossed in their careers.

It feels sort of like I’m waking up. I’m discovering all sorts of things about myself I didn’t know. For one thing, my personality type may be different than what I’d thought my whole life. In Meyers-Briggs terms, medicine is a very STJ world, and my family, and I think Asian culture, is also pretty TJ, but I’m discovering I may actually be more of an FP. When given freedom to make major life decisions, like where to live or how much to work, I’m more driven by gut feeling and values than logic or rules. And when given the freedom to arrange my stay-at-home life and environment the way I prefer, I’m much more unplanned and aesthetic than I’d have thought.

I’m appreciating people from different worlds in new ways. For the first time, our small group doesn’t have a single other physician, or engineer, and no one talks about their job. Work is work; it’s not the only prayer request they have every single week. Odd, but refreshing. We talk about babies and fantasy football. No one has asked me once where I went to school, or what kind of operations I do, but they seem interested in the fact that I can knit, throw clay, and want to learn to sew throw pillows.

It makes me wonder how much of my life has been insulated because of medicine and my approach to it, because of living the majority of my younger years in a world that valued certain things, limited my ability to have a wider variety of relationships and life experiences, and narrowed the decisions I needed to make. I don’t regret any of it, but I see now that it was not the only way, and that was not the only person I could have been. If I could talk with my younger, driven self, I might suggest doing a few things different. Majoring in English or art instead of the sciences. Giving one of those guys asking me out a chance. Traveling instead of spending every summer in a lab.

It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to say whether any of it ought to have changed. I doubt I would have the freedom of choices in my career now if I hadn’t been so focused then, and I don’t take that for granted. But I’m also glad to be at a point and place in life where I can see things differently and learn in different ways. Ironically, I’m back in my hometown, in what truly must be a stroke of divine humor, though perhaps that is what makes all these changes so striking. I look around at familiar roads and places, and I am the same, but very different, and it makes me think.