For When You Feel Empty

For When You Feel Empty


There will come a time when you don't feel like doing medical school. And it wouldn't be the feeling that you hate it, just indifferent to it. All of the passion and fervent zeal on why you'd want to become a doctor may have been used up for the last module and you've had quite enough repetition. You may be feeling exhausted, or at least unmotivated to work out your medical doctorate with fear and trembling. You think that maybe you've been ungrateful or even an impostor! You don't recognize yourself in the mirror. Where did that youthful pre-med aspirant go? No breaths to spare with no spirit to inspire. 

You may feel all these things, these overwhelming things. Let them. But don't give up. Persist, perspire, endure. This is exactly the time to turn those childish motivations in on its head. Go beyond this short vs. long term reward, and give it all up! If you try to get something out of it, are you really being genuine? Pursuing medicine for medicine's sake means to keep showing up even when you don't get anything out of it. Why? Because then medicine would know that you love him more than merely what he makes you feel. 

Being a doctor someday would mean to many to be "married to your work". It's also commonly understood that many people don't understand it. But at its base, it means commitment even if the initial motivation and passion is veiled. Sometimes this fiery desire for medicine may be obscured in favor of testing our spirits to see if we really want this. To be a doctor is not merely a job but a vocation– a response to a calling– a healer's calling. 

As medical students, we have thousands of reasons to be doctors, and perhaps also even a million reasons to not be one. But only one matters: only one reason that fills your mind and body with purpose. The newness becomes familiar yes but it also is freeing. All other reasons matter not, save for this one. Stay steadfast in this one reason you committed to, that you gave your fiat to. 

And what one reason is this other than love. Love that lasts and endures beyond mere optimism to a furnished hope. It is love that is found in action and not just feeling. Love that sets you free but is also at once taking responsibility. A paradox of love that is filling only when fully empty.

To love medicine, then, would mean to give one's life for her healing friendship. Being a friend of medicine, oh what a mystery. "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (Jn 15:13). May you discover anew this love through a person–who you will care for, that reflects the self-sacrificial saving love you've built from all these privileged empty moments. 

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