The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Pre-Terminal Blues
I'm leaving for Scotland in a week, and I have rather mixed feelings about it.
It's the culmination of several years of hard work (and a lot of waiting around), and I did match into the only speciality I wanted, psych. That being said, the prospect of leaving behind a rather comfortable, sheltered life is daunting to say the least, it's been easy for me to coast by; med school takes forever, and even when I was working, it felt more like a prelude to my "actual" professional career rather than something I had to take seriously.
The money didn't matter. I had little in the way of expenses and I lived with my family anyway. I just needed something to keep me occupied while I put my nose to the grindstone, or more productively, buried in textbooks. I never really felt I had to be an adult, as weird as that might sound.
That's about to change. It has to, when I'm crossing several oceans and a continent to find my own way, a stranger in a strange land, the diaspora of extended family rather far for comfort.
It's been a tumultuous time. For the longest time, shifting to the UK was always a problem for the future. I had exams after all, a seemingly interminable number of them. Even when I knocked them down like bowling pins and was informed I'd matched, I felt several months of euphoria from having my efforts be rewarded, and that's long worn off, with me acutely aware that time and distance are going to get in the way of the people and places I hold dear.
I won't really miss India. I'll miss the people I love in it. It's not the worst place to live, if you have money that is. Far from the best. Still, the UK represents an upgrade/side-grade, and I did have to enter training at some point, or forever feel like I'm suffocated by the shadow of giants.
I'll miss my dogs, one of them is turning ten and I won't be here for his birthday. I'm going to miss coming back home after a long day (and night) and feeling the warmth burst out of my chest when I see them waiting for me, tails a-wagging. There isn't much you can say to them to make them understand that you're going away for a long time. Possibly forever. Almost certainly longer than one of them might live. It hurts me more than it hurts them, but half of the pain is being told that the last time I was in the UK for several months, they'd always laid down by my bed or next to the stairs, waiting for my return. They'll be waiting a long time, this time.
Family? Somehow easier yet harder. My grandpa is 95. I can see the cognitive decline slowly hollow out the man I loved. His memory is no longer as tack-sharp as I recalled. He usually forgets when I'm about to leave and I remind him every other day. I listen to his long stories, both personal and anecdotes from an even longer career, and I don't interrupt, even when it's a reprise of what he's just told me yesterday. Holding his hand and sitting by his side is an opportunity drawing from an achingly finite and ever shrinking pool.
My parents will keep. I'll make sure my mom keeps on taking her Ozempic, mild GI side-effects are worth it if it potentially saves her a decade or more of her life, or at least her liver. They're doctors, and still note quite at the age where I have to seriously worry about them, they'll keep. Indians look to their own, I'm not worried, as much as I'll miss them.
My younger brother? He's going to be fine. He's made it through most of med school and while I won't be around to lose hair and pop Ritalin so I can coax him through his exams, my parents are more than capable of the same. The number of doctors in my household will rise as quickly as it fell. Cheeky bastard is stealing my gaming PC, I paid a ridiculous amount for the setup, but while I could pry out the parts with the highest $/kilo, I'm content to let him have it. My old GTX 1070 was a trooper, but he can have my slightly newer RTX 3070, though I've left off dusting my PC for a while as the price he's going to have to pay when scavenging the parts. I'll still miss him, I pity single children, the only reason they're not more lonely is that they don't really see what they're missing out on.
I'll be okay myself. Or so I hope. Any difficulties I face are done willingly, I don't have to face even a tenth of the privation or hardship the older generations in my family had to. They didn't put a silver spoon in my mouth, but it was at least anodized, and I never went hungry.
Still, it's a lot to tackle. Mostly because the NHS and the UK training schemes suck. It's hard to settle in when you have to shift shop every six months, and my first placement is a hospital in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. To give you an idea of how isolated it is, trying to navigate there with Google Maps shows an estimate of 40 minutes of walking and 38 minutes by public transport, from a prospective rental in the nearest village.
Queer isn't it? I thought so too, and I ended up double-checking. Google, in it's infinite wisdom, suggests I walk for 38 minutes to the nearest bus stop.
Which is on the hospital premises.
And from there, I board the bus that'll take me to the very distant second stop, on the other side of the hospital.
Thanks.
Anyway, this means I'll have to buy a car, and I'm still a greenhorn when it comes to driving. If I choose to rent in the bigger city, it's going to be a long commute on a highway, and I'll have to drive a ton even if I end up renting closer as mentioned, assuming I want to do things.
Even living by my lonesome seems scary. I'll be truly alone, no family or friends (at least till I make some at work), though, with the universe being nice for once, I did meet a certain someone who doesn't live all that far away. Let's see how that works out.
It'll probably get better after my initial placement. The second one is actually in a town worth the name, but six months is a long time, for all that time flies by regardless of how much fun you're having.
So much to do. So little time left to do it. The anxiety makes even an otherwise much needed month of lounging about at home seem like I'm burning precious time. I'll see if I can coax my elderly dog into clambering onto my tiny bed, even if that leaves little room for me. I need a hug, and I need to know that things will be okay.
They probably will be. Right?
You don't need a car unless you're getting it for other reasons. The UK is very friendly towards biking and your daily trip can probably be seen as a 30-40 minute bike each way which isn't too bad if you're only doing it for 6 months (a total of 120 working days). It substitutes in for your daily exercise too.
You might be able to pull that off in the more urban parts of England, but I only pray that anyone who tries biking in Scottish autumn and winter, when it's going from constant horizontal rain and fog to snow, ends up in an ER that's not at my hospital. If they did, I'd probably be called in for a psych evaluation.
It's really not practical at all, and I'll inevitably need a car at some point for both the sake of work and convenience.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link