I Needed To Be Reminded: I Was Never Promised “Easy”
Setting the scene: I’m still burned out, but I’m not progressing to charred, blackened, scorched-earth-where-nothing-will-ever-grow-again. To mix my metaphors, I’m burned out, but treading water. Where is there a point where fire and water co-exist? The ocean edge of a volcano, with steam so thick you can’t see through it? There. I’m there.
A lot of you may know that I have no qualms about retreating to my introvert gerbil ball when things get really hard. Admittedly, I canceled some plans with amazing friends earlier this week because I just couldn’t. Today, though, I kept a breakfast with one of my favorite people on earth. My friend Uche, amazing human/neonatologist/ethicist/trauma-informed care extraordinaire, and I try to have breakfast every few months. It is inevitably a situation where we have to arrange the date way far in the future, such that I’m surprised when it pops up on my calendar, and I’m always grateful to Past Jessie: Past Jessie was so proactive to get this on her calendar, now it’s just up to Present Jessie to not introvert-out and cancel.
We covered wide ground: family things, work things, internal things, external things, old things, future things. I did way more than my fair share of the talking, and just that was pure catharsis. But then Uche was telling me about something that somebody else in her life was going through, and recalled her response to that person, “Well, who said this was supposed to be easy?”
Stop. Wait a minute. Rewind that and play it back.
My brain glitched, my eyes unfocused, my throat closed up, and my heart dropped. Who said this was supposed to be easy? “This” being all of this, my mind picturing hands moving in a way to convey everything around me in all planes, but also everything near, far, in-between, literal and figurative. I’m going through hard things. And I was never promised easy.
It’s funny what you can say to others and then need to be reminded of yourself. Coaching taught me that life is 50/50, 50% “good” and 50% “bad.” (I’ve zhuzhed this to say “50/50, but on a bell curve.”) Our society has also taught us that if we don’t feel good all the time, we’re doing something wrong. And conveniently, our society has all sorts of fixes for the “wrong” we’re doing in the form of make-up, hair dye, tweakments, full-blown plastic surgery, fancy jobs with fancy accolades, clothes, cars, houses, schools, hobbies, and country club memberships…
See the conflict of interest there?
Separately, I’m transported back to the time I chose this “hard” way back when in middle school, when I just started telling everybody that I was going to be a doctor. I don’t have a big physician origin story: I was good at science, and the kids around me who were good at science said they were going to be doctors. I didn’t find a broken baby bird and nurse it back to health, I didn’t have a sick family member and grapple with the meaning of life and death (though that did come later, but I was already solidly pre-med when it did). I chose this “hard,” and I kept choosing it, over and over again, as I ascended through the ranks of academic medicine.
Not to state the obvious, but “hard” is, well, really, really hard. As in, the opposite of “easy.” No thesaurus necessary, no need to sift through shades of gray. Ask any, I don’t know, second grader, “What’s the opposite of ‘easy’?” They’re going to answer, “Hard.”
And then, I go back to a different time, only months ago, when I told a group of general pediatrics residents that nothing wrong is necessarily happening when bad things happen, because anything worth having involves risk. If we put our reach program #1 on our rank list, we risk not matching there and having to tell everybody we didn’t get our first choice. If we bet big on a single investment, we risk losing our fledgling retirement accounts. If we date to find the love of our lives, we risk getting our hearts completely decimated. Anybody, I told the residents, who’s happy 100% of the time is living a small life without risk. And we are not living small lives.
On some level, I’ve chosen to take risks. I’ve chosen to work hard. I’ve chosen to take on challenges. I’ve chosen to care deeply, and with my entire being. That means I will go through periods that are really, really hard. Zooming out, I’ve honestly felt really good at work for at least the past four-ish years, so, if 50/50 on a bell curve is true (and I deeply believe it is), I was probably due for a low period. The trap is believing that something has been taken from me and I’ll never get it back. Sure, my circumstances will change, and I’ll get a break from patient care, but I’m also growing, I’m stretching, I’m healing something that got broken. This time will pass, and I will get myself out of it. Passive and active. Patience and action.
Who ever told us medicine would be easy? Nobody. And that’s what makes it worth it.