what i learnt about medicine (and life) from a dirty hipster.

I was at the bus stop today (cool story, bro) and this guy started talking to me, as you do when you’re a sociable fellow with half an hour to spare. He told me about his life, and hitchhiking, and travelling with monkeys in Southern Africa, and swapping booze and party drugs for massages (he’s a qualified masseur, or so he said) at festivals.

Maybe he was making it up. But the important thing is that he’s my age—and I have absolutely no life experience.

So as I sat on the bus going home, I started to wonder why I’ve never wandered out of my comfort zone.

Fear.

As medical students, fear is ingrained into us. Fear of failure. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of a seemingly inevitable mistake that kills a patient. Fear of getting an answer wrong in front of a consultant. And after a while, that fear creeps out of our work lives and into our personal lives, and we’re struck with this inexplicable anxiety about everything, both inside, and outside of, medicine.

Our lives become a series of milestones by which we procrastinate. I’ll travel when I graduate. I’ll write when the semester is finished. I’ll do all those things I love when medicine is finished. But medicine doesn’t finish. It doesn’t go away once you’ve graduated or finished intern year or entered a surgical training program or you own the hospital. However, your youth does finish.

I’m not saying go and hang with monkeys and catch monkey fleas and do hard drugs. In fact, I would advise NOT doing any of those things. But have fun. Find passions outside of medicine. Hang out with your non-med friends. Do charity work.

Don’t wait for medicine to enjoy your life.

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    craziness still matters. :)

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    only med student who thought

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