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This isn't fun, more wellness, but I am going to abuse the immense power invested in me by virtue of being an admin and post here anyway.
How do I become more independent?
I speak in a very general sense. For an Indian kid, your life is set out on rails by your parents till high school, at which point your intelligence and diligence will determine what career you land, your college further constraining your options, until you end up in a life that proceeds with getting promoted, married, kids, and then dead.
But I am a homebody. It reflects on how deeply I hate the circumstances of my life that I am willing to throw so much away to leave it all behind. My parents, who I couldn't ask more of (other than having gotten my ADHD treated when I had begged them to), my dogs, my comfortable house and ailing grandpa, with whom every year apart is a non-negligible chance I'll never see him again.
But I lack drive. Curiosity? Yes. Intelligence? A quite decent level of it, if not world shattering. But so far my life has been railroaded along, with my only real choices being to either study hard or not, at least till the end of med school. I did take charge once, brushed myself into shape, proved, both to the GMC and to myself that I am a competent doctor. Or at least I did that as the first of many more times to come.
And now I feel adrfit. I can't go the country I wish to dwell in more than my own, that forms the earliest childhood memories of mine (unless I join the other illegal immigrants headed to El Salvador), I am forced to confront a mediocre life in a country that is in visible decline, hoping it beats the comforts of home (and the horrors of postgraduate training here).
I see people doing things out of sheer tenacity and drive, whereas I've mostly done things because I had to, or because I find the default path unbearable.
I don't want to live alone. It seems overwhelming. I don't want a job that saps me of all my energy and interest in doing anything else, let alone doing that while giving yet more exams.
I feel, for the lack of a better word, broken. I was moderately depressed, a feeling kept at bay through overwork and stimulant consumption in the hopes I'd achieve a brighter future, but they're dimming the lights as I speak. Shutting doors ahead of me as soon as I stepped through the ones behind.
If you think the stimulants help with that? A little, I guess. I wouldn't have made it through med school or all the exams since without them. But it doesn't solve the problem I see of being entirely unmoored, and I am not quite ready to resign myself to this life. Ritalin does not make what I've spoken of seem any less daunting. And the anti-depressants didn't work in the first place, and I tried a bunch of them.
I want the energy to explore alternatives. I want a job that pays well and treats me like I'm a skilled professional. I want to run a house without feeling overwhelmed and letting it go to rot. I want to be a father, and a good one, an even better one than my dad was to me, because he sacrificed his life outside medicine to give me the option of choice later.
If anyone has any advice, please share. My tether, while not quite fraying, gets ever tauter. I want executive function god fucking dammit, and nothing has helped. I just want something to look forward to, a route to a world where I can be, if not happy, content.
Are there any other countries you can go to that, even if they're not your first choice of the US, are still better than your current option?
See, the same reason that I can't go to the US also locks me out of Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
It boils down to a single US company/non-profit that accreditates international med schools. Mine happens to meet the legal requirements for India, namely being recognized by our national regulator, but they skimped out on this one, since barring me and a handful of others, few of the previous graduates had any aspirations for going abroad, and those that did chose the UK. This was something I wasn't aware of when I joined, or I'd have dropped a year and tried for someplace better.
So imagine my gut-wrenching horror, years down the line, when I discover I'm locked out of the States, with no recourse short of the med school getting certified, and retroactively too to cover my batch. Which might still be possible. I consoled myself by thinking surely the UK can't be that bad right? But the more I learn about it, including from interacting with the locals, the lower my opinion of it goes.
In terms of alternatives, well, there's Germany and Hong Kong, maybe a few other weird places. None I wish to live in, for one reason or another.
At any rate, the UK still holds some pointless and misplaced sense of pride about its place on the world stage, hence them ignoring that US organization for the large part, even if they're used to verify the credentials of applicants. So that does so far seem the best option.
There might be some places like the Middle East, but I would despise living there, and I need to get more credentials under my belt before it's worth the effort.
Can the UK act as a stepping stone to the US? Invest a decade there, get credentials that are valid in the US, then hop on over?
Your success in the rest of the world has very little relevance to your career in the US, as in (barring vaguely remembered exceptions for pioneering doctors and the like), they don't give two hoots what degrees you accumulated outside, at most they care enough to check if you have a basic medical degree, which if accredited, entitles you to give the USMLE and do a residency program. So even a relatively experienced doctor, native to the UK or not, is largely shit out of luck even if they've reached the highest level of certification outside.
This seems to be true after I looked it up, but either way, the reason I am screwed is because my base medical qualification (MBBS) is the issue (since my med school didn't bother to do the ECFMG thing, which is a proactive step and not something they'll just hand out without asking). This won't change unless the former does, even if I rack up an entire alphabet of additional degrees outside. My dad, nationally famous in his line of work, or the even more famous Director of my Oncology Department (widely recognized as the best in the country, or tied for it) would be in the same boat, as would almost any other doctor who didn't study in the US. You might have 30 years of experience and be at the peak of your niche, but in their eyes, you're required to jump through the same hoops as a wet behind the years grad from a US med school. And do another 3-7 years of training, even if your supervising doctor isn't qualified to teach you to suck eggs, you invented them.
If there are any exceptions, they're not worth noting, or at least not relevant in my case.
If it was just the US, I could moan and bear it, but quite a few of the countries that are better than the UK still rely on that US body I mentioned, in much the same manner most small countries are content to follow FDA regulations without really bothering to set up their own equivalents, or at least accept them uncritically. The UK just happens to be too proud to do that.
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