An Introduction

Hello,

My name, pseudonymously speaking anyway, is Arjuna. I am a first-year medical student on the East Coast in the US. I have mulled around the idea of starting a blog for quite some time, but I guess I never really felt like I had much of a reason to. Until now, anyway. You see, being a medical student is an incredible experience. I have never loved the pursuit of knowledge as much as I do know. I have never felt as much purpose and inspiration from my life, as now. What could be more inspiring than watching a surgeon operate a million-dollar robot to resect cancer from a patient who is struggling for their life? What more purpose could someone ask for, than learning how to diagnose and treat degenerative neurological illness? There are many other amazing and worthwhile professions and life  paths in the world, but I do not ever regret choosing medicine.

Well, let's amend that to most days. Most days I do not regret it. This path comes with a cost. You see, I feel like I am losing part of myself -- one of the most special of parts. It is being drained away by medical school. Or, maybe it is just part of becoming an adult, and would have happened anyway. Maybe life really is supposed to be this hard. And that is one of the reasons why I needed to start writing. No one in my life can understand or appreciate what this experience is to me. I have entered into such a specialized study of knowledge that I have immense difficulty explaining what my life is like to my friends and family, dear to my heart though they may be. And I just don't feel comfortable discussing these issues with most of my classmates. Not only are they going to be my future colleagues (which comes with a need to have some professional distance), but medical students are just too consumed by the struggles of their own lives to have the time and energy to connect with others on an emotionally intimate level.

This time that I have right now will probably prove to be among the most difficult (and formative) of my life. My relationship (of 5 years) just ended this week. It was an emotionally abusive relationship that forced my friends out of my life and left me an emotional cripple, and I allowed myself to stay in the relationship because I loved her. Foolish, stupid me. I traveled across the country to go to THIS medical school, HERE, for her. 6 months in and every reason I have for being where I am, and not 2,000 miles away, is a reminder of my naïveté. Dealing with all of this on top of the daily challenges of medical school seems insurmountable. Medical school, on its bad days, sometimes makes you feel like you got the ever-living-crap kicked out of you. You feel incompetent, useless, stupid, and worry that you don't have what it takes to become a doctor. You can pour your entire being into studying for the next exam, but it might not stop you from failing. It may not necessarily be an F on your report card, but every medical student fails on some consistent basis. Even if it is offending a patient by accident then having them yell and scream insults at you. Yes, this has already happened to me, the first-year medical student.

I guess becoming a doctor is like a metamorphosis. It's not going to be easy, and you come out the other side as a completely evolved organism. But there are some parts of pre-medical school-Arjuna that I liked, dammit. I played an instrument. I could cook a tasty meal. I read books on all sorts of different subjects and I tried many new and wonderful hobbies, from martial arts, to obscure art-making, to lockpicking. Once, a friend of mine called me the most interesting person she had ever met. Now, I am pretty sure that I am more boring than any of my old friends from college. I want to make sure that I recapture the good parts of Arjuna with me as I move forward in my career. And I desperately want to leave the maladaptive parts (the parts that kept me in a horrible soul-sucking relationship) far behind me.

There is more to life than this. There has to be.