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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.
I'm going to suggest the most basic-bitch thing I can think of: Travel, on your own, for like 2 months straight on a threadbare budget. Have you done this before?
Nothing else will prove more effectively to you that the rails are imaginary. You don't have to live here, and work in this career, and marry her, and have x kids, collecting y salary. Nothing is actually stopping you, short of having enough food to drink and water to eat every day.
This youtube movie is incredibly precious but has great cinematography and shows you what I mean. You may not be nearly the rolling-exoskeleton fanatic I am, but also tries to get that point across. The first step to independence is reminding yourself that the freedom exists and is there for the taking.
I say this all as a person very much living out the script. I go camping 3 weekends a year and cause my body controlled pain through endurance sports to stay sane. The script is great, most the time, but you should figure out what parts of you actually want to keep.
I appreciate the advice, though I'm not sure it's for me.
I never really got the appeal of traveling, or at least I'm largely ambivalent on undirected wandering of the nature you're suggesting. I used to be against even going on vacation, but a few years of being an actual worker did teach me to appreciate the benefits of kicking back at a beach and sipping a drink.
Not really, the very idea stresses me out! I'm not kidding when I say I'm a homebody, if I didn't have friends or a girlfriend who insisted on occasionally asking me to go places, I would be perfectly content to stay indoors indefinitely.
I very much enjoyed my family trip to Thailand, quite possibly one of the last I'll have before emigration or professional commitments make it impossible, but while I could more or less afford to do something like a backpack trip solo (or at least in India itself), it really isn't appealing.
If I burn out completely, I'll quit my job and pester my family to visit some other place, and probably feel a lot better for it.
I mean, I do understand all of that. If all I want to do is eat, drink and find shelter, I could work indefinitely at the same level I am right now, in India, and coast through till I die.
I would very much prefer not to. My general laziness and risk aversion is only being overruled because I very much am gravely concerned about my future financial and physical wellbeing. I think my job is doomed (then again that's the case for almost everyone). I think India is ripe for deep unrest or even a breakdown (I can't give anything but deeply subjective probabilities, but I think the risk is unacceptable). I see either becoming the citizen of a wealthy First World country (whether the UK counts becomes more dubious by the day) a necessity solely for the small degree of security that provides.
Basically, everything I've done for the past 2 or 3 years is because the sheer stress and panic I feel about the future outweighs my preference to do nothing at all. My family is well off by Indian standards, even if hardly uber rich. I could mooch off my parents, marry someone arranged for me, those are all options.
They happen to be options I reject, in a relatively considered manner, after weighing the pros and cons.
Stress is not inherently bad, or else humans wouldn't have evolved to have it. It constitutes a sign of potentially real danger, even if in excess it is obviously detrimental. Stress and fear has motivated me to do quite a lot, to do much of anything at all, given that I am absolutely not the typical Type A personality you'd expect from a doctor.
My career is probably the best I can opt for, given my personality and talents. I am not bad at it. I even considered switching, moving into SWE or even ML, but the fact that I'm Indian, and the ongoing layoffs and general tightening of visa restrictions, means that I decided it was probably a bad idea. Too much competition, too little time, for increasingly uncertain dividends. What could be better for me? I want money, both for what it provides and some degree of security. I want not to waste what I feel is very limited time to earn some before I become obsolete.
I want to marry and have kids, and raise them well, and be a good dad and provider. You can see that my opinions are heterodox enough that if I didn't want to, I'd buck it like any of the other societal defaults I reject.
It is possible that I am caged by my own expectations, but I hold a knife to my back because it motivates me to keep on moving forward.
I wish it were otherwise. I wish I didn't have ADHD or depression, though I have never known anything else. I wish I was more self-directed, but at least I know I am doing something proactive to fix things. It might make me more unhappy in the moment, but happiness is not my only terminal goal, and I reject something along the lines of Buddhist desires to liberate one's self from desire or expectations.
My post was a plea for help, but if nothing else, my profession tells me that not all pleas are answered or help forthcoming. I'll just try and keep on rolling till the wheels fall off.
Nonetheless, thank you for your suggestion, if all else fails, I'm sure it couldn't hurt, if only to let me decompress for a bit. I have my exam in about 36 hours so no time to watch the video (not that I should be here at all), but I will promise to watch it as the least I can do after you went to the trouble of making a suggestion you consider in my best interests.
If you'll forgive a little prod here - the advice could be considered generic. In many ways it is. But I think it's a better fit than you may be seeing. Your prompt:
Quite simply, you must untether yourself from support and get practice at surviving and thriving when in that position. There are several ways to skin this cat, but all of them will bump up against your nature as a homebody.
Solo travel will accomplish this in several ways. You'll be forced to appreciate the social connections you do have right now, close at hand, once you have far fewer. Once you find your level of actual need and want for these connections, you'll also be forced to develop them, a valuable skill. Perhaps most importantly, you don't have to exclusively travel via primitive camping and just a backpack's worth of supplies, though a stint doing so is advised. You'll be able to find places where you can find a job that treats you like a professional, run your household the way you see fit, and find a reasonable alternative to staying in India.
The consequences of following through on this plan include delaying marriage and family by some amount, spending resources faster than they can be replenished, and the potential that your viewpoint on your life as it stands today could become more negative. You'll also face a very difficult decision with your romantic relationship.
My only qualifications to provide life advice are twofold: I've uprooted myself twice to positive results, and I have friends who are the older version of you (down to some surprising details). I'm, of course, making some assumptions about your ability to solve problems and speak to people over the vast gulf of textual internet communication. If they're reasonably accurate, though, I believe you could do this successfully.
It might hearten you to know that I just traveled for the first time entirely solo to the other end of the country and made it back intact. Not quite literally the only time I've traveled alone, but certainly it involved figuring out quite a bit on my lonesome for several days with nobody to hold my hand if I ended up fucked in a city where I knew nobody and barely spoke the language.
It wasn't nearly as scary as I thought, and that makes me more positively predisposed to take t your advice, even if this was business more than pleasure.
In terms of finding a job and doing something, the main issue is visas. Westerners, especially Americans, really take for granted being able to do largely whatever they want, wherever and whenever they want. And medicine is a heavily regulated profession, almost uniquely difficult to just wing it. If you have suggestions for the kind of thing I could do to pay my way, I'm not averse to hearing it!
But I have leaned more towards the idea of just fucking off somewhere for a bit, more than I was inclined before toh suggested it, so I am thankful for you taking the time to help me!
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