Imagine that you’re a program director (PD) going through scores of ERASes and interviews. What questions would you ask yourself as you assessed each residency candidate to avoid big headaches? 1) Can this person do the job? Is s/he competent?…Read more ›
Even though residency in Los Angeles has not been at all what I thought it would be like, and I’ve suffered a lot while I’ve been here for one reason or another, I definitely feel like this has been a huge learning opportunity for me. It’s important to not only know what you want but also what you need to thrive, what you don’t like, and what you can live without. So even though I’ve had a tough few years in California, I feel proud of myself for going through a lot of personal growth, which I really needed in retrospect.
Without further ado, here’s a list of key things I’ve learned these last few years:
I’ve learned what is important to me - what I need to keep me happy in the darkest of times - which is family in physical proximity; close friends in physical proximity; and/or a supportive, passionate, positive work environment. I don’t necessarily need all 3, but ideally 2/3 or at the very minimum 1/3. (And I definitely consider my fiancee to part of the definition of “family”.)
It’s not productive to focus on the negative things or people in your life, whether they’re in your past or present. People usually have a reason why they did what they did, and usually, it has more to do with their own distortions than anything you did. In other words, what people do and say are reflections of themselves, not you. It’s much more conducive to your own life to forgive, let go, forget about it, and focus on what and who you do love and your future which is wide open in front of you. Sometimes, this can be as simple as unfollowing or blocking people on social media. Out of sight, out of mind. Our time on Earth is limited, and we really need to focus on what is important to us. This is a lesson I’ve been trying to master for a while now - pretty much for the majority of my life. It’s a work in process, but I think I’ve really started to actually grasp this in reality and not just in concept over the last year or so.
Work is work. Be professional. One of the major sources of significant anxiety for me was not being able to separate work and personal life. Actually, my biggest problem was even recognizing that I was blurring the two to begin with. I think this is especially relevant in the resident world. A significant number of us go straight through school and training, e.g. high school --> college --> medical school --> residency without any breaks in between, or if we had breaks in between, they were minimal and they were at jobs where work/personal distinction was a lot more tangible. But in the medicine/residency world, a lot of us are used to treating colleagues as friends, because that’s what we’ve always done without major or recurrent repercussions. But that’s the key -- once you’re in residency, although it feels like you’re still in school since it’s the same cohort of people, actually it’s really not. We’re no longer in school. We’re working professionals, albeit grossly underpaid professionals, whose choices (e.g. calling out sick) actually have repercussions on our colleagues. This is not like in medical school where you can call out sick, miss lecture, and your classmates/friends don’t care (beyond making sure you’re okay of course) because it doesn’t actually affect them. However, in residency, if you call in sick and it turns out you just wanted to leave early for weekend plans thus jeopardizing another resident to cover for you or if you do a poor job of managing a patient and someone else has to pick up your slack afterwards, you can see how that has real repercussions, and if you’re supposedly friends with them too, that can strain both the work and personal relationships. Once I realized I was blurring my work/personal lives, I made changes to make that more clear, and my life got a lot more stress-free.
Travel, eating out/trying new food, and other things popularized by social media (coughInstagramcough) are meaningless to me if I’m not doing those things with people I love whose company I enjoy. What I’m trying to say is I value my relationships with people more than going through a bucket list of things to do just to show I did them.
I need lots of personal time - like a LOT more than the average person. That makes me introvert, which after listening to this TED Radio Hour podcast by NPR that defines introvert vs extrovert scientifically actually makes me accept and embrace being an introvert more. I need to time to absorb, reflect, accept, embrace, dig down deep, find what I want so that I can move forward with more purpose and meaning. Otherwise I feel like I’m just going through the motions, and that is not a kind of living I desire to have.
I am privileged. This is something I take for granted, and I need to reflect on that more and appreciate how good my life actually is. I recently complained to my mom about all the things I hate about my life right now, and she seriously dead pans, “I don’t see what the problem is.” Tough love, baby, tough love. And that’s what I really needed, tbh. That helped immensely to bring me out of a recent bout of depression.
I need hard but meaningful work to feed my soul and make me happy. I can never be someone who works an office job, buys nice things, travels for the sake of traveling or showing off on Insta, holding extravagant parties that look like they came straight from Pinterest - essentially the life of a socialite in a city like Los Angeles. I’ve been ruined by my upbringing - I’m always going to be someone who finds joy in accomplishing something hard, going after something that I think is meaningful and will make the world a better place.
What I’m also trying to say is Los Angeles is probably not my soul city - a concept that the lovely ladies from Perfectly Imperfect talked about recently in their podcast on soulmates. I thought I would love it here because there’s so much sunshine which would be good for my seasonal affective disorder, there’s so much good ASIAN FOOD, there’s good hiking, so many national/state parks, so much KPOP, etc, BUT I realized all those things combined are not enough to make me happy given the crazy amount of traffic, the overall culture of superficiality, and the lack of people whose company I enjoy. I think my soul city is more like NYC, Washington DC, or even Seattle. To be brutally honest, I want to be surrounded more by intellectual ideas and in-your-face honesty than by vanity and superficial niceties. Even if that means giving up sunny weather, palm trees, and beautiful beaches 12 months a year.
Keeping in touch with old friends is SO HARD, but at the end of the day, if you do a good job of it, trust me - it’s so SO WORTH IT. It’s all about consistency, and not just keeping them updated with phone calls but all the things that modern technology has made available to us - texts, emails, SNS updates. However, that being said, all those of combined does not make up for the good old fashioned phone call or seeing each other in person.
That’s all I have for now. I’m sure I will come up with other thoughts later, which I will update this post with as I think of them. I hope that some of these have helped you a little whether you’re embarking on the residency life, starting a new life in a new city, or both!
