Hitting Rock Bottom – apparently you bounce

It’s been two weeks since I stopped working. Two weeks sober. What a fortnight I have had…

When I woke up the next day at 8am instead of 6am and had nowhere to be, it felt delicious. The hours of the day stretched out before me, with waves of potential, and to be honest, all I really wanted was to have a break for a bit. I knew I would need time to process leaving Medicine. I didn’t quite anticipate the size of the grief reaction that was about to hit me.

The following Friday, I took myself down to Russell Square where the Professional Support Unit is based. I called them before I left my last job on the advice of the Dean and I really can’t recommend them enough for any doctor in training (foundation or speciality) who is in trouble. They provide all sort of help, from confidential mental health support to career coaching. When I called I had a really interesting conversation with a lady who turned out to be herself a creative – she is a freelance screenwriter who also works on a freelance basis for the Professional Support Unit. They allocated her to be my mentor, I suppose because of our common interest in writing.

We sat down together in a little room with the sunlight streaming in, and we talked. She asked me about my strengths, my likes, my dislikes and my values. And do you know, I found it so hard to articulate those things. After all that communications training, and despite my own quadrilingual tongue, I could not think of a word to say for myself. I panicked internally; how the hell was I going to perform in future interviews if the answer to “what are your strengths?” was silence?

I can’t really say I’ve ever thought much about any of those things. My strength was always my ability to pass exams or ARCPs, my values were insignificant because I was already doing something of such great value, and as for my likes and dislikes, that conversation mainly revolved around the choice between doing medicine or surgery, or between being a hospital doctor or a GP.

My mentor (I will call her ‘Jane’ for the purposes of this) then tried a different tack. She asked me to describe different experiences in my life. She got me to talk about the time I did some voluntary work in West Nepal, and suddenly, talking became a whole lot easier. I could actually appreciate the fact that turning up in the middle of nowhere in an unknown country was pretty brave. I could see that, after being told I was going to be an English teacher but then when I got there, they needed me to be an Art teacher for deaf young people and Dance teacher for street kids, I needed a great deal of adaptability and quick thinking to provide that.

“You’re a storyteller,” Jane told me, “You find it easier to talk about yourself through the medium of stories.”

Deep down, I’ve always known this. I novelise everything because it makes it easier for me to understand and therefore easier to cope with the difficult things in life. I didn’t realise this was a good interview technique.

She gave me some homework to do and I left feeling pretty positive. I realised that now was the perfect time to get to know myself a little better – not with a view to becoming self-centred, but more with the aim to appreciate what’s there already and what isn’t, and to have confidence in my strengths while appreciating my weaknesses. I started to look at my CV, which is very medic-orientated, and tried to see how I could change it to make sense to non-clinical people.

Then the doubt set in.

One day last week, a family member called me up with the express desire to talk about my career. What am I doing now? I’m just lying around at home? Officially unemployed. After all that work, I’m unemployed. So how am I managing financially? Oh, I’m using my savings? Well that’s not very sensible, is it? Am I just going to be a housewife now? Am I going to rely on my fiancé for everything now?

It was so distressing that I couldn’t carry on with the conversation. The idea that no longer being a doctor meant I could only ever be a housewife was ringing in my ears, and I was crying. I tried to rally myself: ‘I will find a job. It might even be a well-paid one, who knows? I will earn my own money and be a useful member of society.’ But it was no use, because when you’re faced with people around you who are baffled by your choices:

“I just don’t understand why you didn’t finish F2! Even if you didn’t want to continue being a doctor in the future, why didn’t you finish F2? It’s bad not to complete things. When you start something, you should finish it. You only had 4 months to go! What are your reasons? What’s your plan?”

These are reasonable questions to ask, and I know the people ask them are just worried about me and want the best for me, but I find it hard to reveal my real reasons because I fear they won’t be taken seriously. I left because my heart was telling me to, and my only definite plan at the moment is to finish my novel while somehow finding my way into the right career. Such delicate and vague ideas are too easily quashed before they blossom, so I protect them from the storm around me by keeping them to myself.

People tell me that I’m just too romantic. I’m just a dreamer. A friend of mine told me all the people she knew who had tried to do something different and had ended up crawling back to their original profession with tails between legs, but she also told me that even if I manage to get another job, it will never make up for the fact that I didn’t finish my F2, because this is the biggest mistake of my life and I will regret it.

It makes me feel panicky just recalling these conversations. I feel like a small child who had done something very bad and is now being scolded, but it is worse, because I don’t have the protection of actually being a small child. I am an adult, supposed to be successful, supposed to be self-sufficient, but all I am is one great big failure.

There it was. That word. Failure.

It’s surprisingly easy to go from niggling doubts at the back of your mind to full-blown depression. It’s a well-trodden path for me, so I know the way down pretty well, and down I went. I felt completely and utterly worthless. The weight of my mistakes and my decisions weighed heavily upon me, and I just couldn’t see how I was of any use or benefit to anyone in this world. I was only a burden on my parents, on my fiancé and all my friends. I was so low and so anxious that I couldn’t even bear the thought of locuming! What was the point of continuing? What the hell was the point of me?

Thankfully, the way back up is also a well-trodden path for me, and what I have found is, when you feel that way, you internalise everything. Paradoxically, you do become self-centred, caught in a loop of negative feedback with you in the middle of it. You break that when you connect with other people, and specifically when you help other people.

On my birthday last Friday, I went to look after my friend, who recently was admitted to hospital, and was coming home to an empty house, as her husband was away in Sri Lanka. I made her lunch and did some jobs for her, and helping her made me feel like a good person again, and she helped me by listening to me and comforting me.

I had just come back from running some errands for her when I noticed some books on her bookshelf. They were her husband’s books about the history of Sri Lanka, written during the 1800s. I could hardly believe my luck! My novel is historically based on the British colonisation of Sri Lanka and here in front of me were books documenting that very period! I asked her if I could borrow them.

I am now sitting on my sofa at home, exactly where I was a week ago, when I was so paralysed by fear and doubt that I felt unequal to everything, but now I have a book in my hand. I’m reading two others at the same time. Researching this topic is exciting! It’s actually fascinating to get a glimpse of what happened and how people lived in those days. My hand alternates between pens and highlighters and I’m brainstorming about how to include all this history in my story. The time passes quickly and I am in my element.

Things aren’t completely OK yet, but this enthusiasm is infinitely better than the despair I felt last week. I still feel really concerned that people will think I’m just bumming around and sapping resources, but I’m beginning to see that worrying myself into a frenzy is just about the perfect way of becoming the very thing I’m afraid of. I am not a failure. As for being accused of being a ‘romantic’ – that’s absolutely correct. Count me with the dreamers, and watch me make a career out of it.