By EK Wills
Everyone has bad days but what happens when you have one of those ones that make you question what you’re doing in life?
Over time, I have learned that I need to blow off steam. I am very lucky that I have a couple of people that will tolerate listening to my rant so that the pressure can re-stabilise and life can go on.
But not before enough hot air has been expelled. This blog reflects one of those rants and hopefully some perspective on how to deal with it.
This week I had a week of study leave. I planned my approach, allocated my hours, took study breaks and actually enjoyed spending some time not having to do the daily grind of going to work. Odd as it sounds, it was going well.
I was about to sit the first of three barrier exams to become a medical specialist. I’m not the first to sit the test, and it is renowned for being the easiest of the three.
Peers were saying to do practice tests and it should be a breeze and I’d done so many this week that I thought I had it covered. But the one I did the night before the actual exam, had curve ball questions I hadn’t encountered. And when I got a less than impressive score, I started to doubt my ability to pass.
The background to this is that I had already failed this exam once and was keeping it pretty quiet because who wants to admit that you failed the first exam even if it was by a whisker?
The day of the test arrived.
I found myself strangely unnerved from the practice test the day before.
I’d lost the confidence in my ability to pass and was getting nervous about the consequences since we are only allowed to sit the test three (3) times before having to ‘show cause’. Showing cause entails justifying to the college why you should be allowed to continue to train in that specialty if you have not kept up to the standard by passing the hurdles in a timely manner.
Ironically, there is much speculation about the necessity of the current requirements and the degree of difficulty involved in these. Articles have been written about it since the introduction of excessive bureaucracy and paperwork that was meant to standardise the assessment process.
But that means little to you when you sit down to do the exam and are confronted with inane questions that pose little relevance to your daily job but serve as’ left field’ trivia facts such as who was the person that came up with transactional analysis or what is the starting dose of Levothyroxine, particularly when we have good standardised references we can refer to in daily practice.
After the slowest three hour exam dragged by, I counted up the number of questions I didn’t know the answer to and the ones that I wasn’t sure about and convinced myself that I had failed this exam, too.
It is a computer based multiple choice exam which could spit out the result instantly at the conclusion of the test but the college needs to have a month to work out whether you have passed or not. So, I get to endure a month of uncertainty, fearing the worst, with the very real likelihood of confirmation of that fear. Then I can spend another month berating myself that I am useless and don’t deserve to pass.
Unfortunately, in my privileged position, I am not allowed to complain about it. I am to be resilient and keep it in perspective. I am supposed to go back to work, enjoy doing it, as well as do the overtime with gusto, and put it all out of my mind.
But what happens when you can’t let it go?
I could justify my doubt because of the long road travelled in order to get this far. I could add that having any kind of outside life means having to juggle family commitments with work and study. I could even admit that I constantly feel the tug of war between spending time with my kids and doing what is required to pass.
I don’t like the word resilience. It puts people in the position of being judged incapable and weak without acknowledging that sometimes life isn’t fair and we are allowed to not be happy about it.
Right now I’m tired. Tired of the inefficiencies in the system. Tired of the convoluted requirements with such little return in the short term and often lack of support. Tired of being under paid in a system that can’t pay the award rate based on your responsibilities so calls you something else to pay you less.
The future is held out like a carrot with promise of benefit to come. But it is like the donkey with the carrot tied on the end of a stick; never attainable but eternally hanging in front of your face.
This weekend I am allowing myself a rave and to relax the pressure of having to be able to deal with it. I decided to share ait because mostly no one does and if people do they are frowned upon for their weakness, their humanity and their display of emotion.
Then I saw A Dangerous Method: a movie about Freud and Jung, two iconical psychiatrists with very similar but also divergent views on analytical theory. The point raised in its portrayal is how to free the mind in order to heal. And there is no single way for that to be achieved. It takes individuals to find what works for them.
I like to process events through writing. It has developed over years of journaling and now in taking the step to speak my thoughts in a blog. So this week is about reinforcing that need to process life events the way you need to.
Its our job to make sense of what is happening to us or at least to process it so we feel clear about what we are doing and why. It’s worth making the time for yourself to find that process and hopefully enjoy what you discover on the way.
If you haven’t found what works for you, keep trying new things. Sometimes you may find you come back to ways that were always there but were initially in the background: like writing was for me.
Now I can put on the brave face and go back to work next week, forget about the exam and wait till the results are due.
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