Listening to the Pauses in Life ....

It might seem obvious, but I have slowly come to realize that medical school is not an isolated event in our lives. 

For the longest time, I have always believed that hard work and perseverance are enough to trump any difficulty in life. Overcome any obstacle. While I have long known that excelling in medical school is not that same as the excellence I was once familiar with, the well-ingrained principle of academic excellence is difficult to adapt around. Not that I have been doing horribly, but I have started to understand that it is neither weakness nor a simple lack of hard work when I place average among a net of brilliant individuals.

I have also started to realize, and perhaps understand, that life does not simply pause with the progression of medical school. Regardless of the difficulty of each theme, life still goes on. Seeing the strength of my classmates deal with the loss of loved ones, difficult breakups, financial troubles, friendship/roommate drama, and so much more (along with some of my own personal life-problems), I have slowly come to realize medical school occurs in context of the already-existent complexity of life. 

Medical school is hard enough as it is without the distractions, but I think the hardest part of medical school is chugging through and persevering despite the struggles and hard disappointments of our lives. I wish that we could simply hit pause at the commencement of medical school and let our problems be solely focused on excelling in medicine, but alas, things are not so simple. And it is so hard for us to realize that there is an outside of this all-encompassing aspect of our young lives. It is so easy for medical school to completely engulf and permeate into all corners of our lives, colouring every aspect of our waking perception (and sometimes even our unwaking perceptions) of the world.

But what I have finally started to learn is that medical school is a part of my life, not a lifestyle.

Medicine is something I chose to do, but it is not all of who I am.