Second week of medical school. As the stress and pressure increase, my more dramatic and analytical self emerges. I begin to ask myself if some level of sadism isn’t involved in the lives of medical students. Are we not all inflicting some pain on ourselves with these endless hours of studying in the hopes that it will lead to happiness later in life? Most importantly, when will we reach that elusive “later in life”?

I remember being in high school and thinking that if I study well and get into a good college, then I’ll be set. I got to college and discovered that the process was far from over. So I repeated what I told myself in high school: If I did well in college, I’ll go to medical school then I’ll be set. Well, here I am… and I think things are as unsettled as can be. After medical school, there is residency, and then fellowship. So far, life has been a series of “thens”. Perhaps I need to focus more on the now than later.

And who is to say that my education is the only defining point of my life? Is my life really spaced out into neat increments of post high school, post college, and post medical school? Or does my personal development trump those events? And for that matter, what has been my personal development? Maybe it is the sheer difficulty of organizing character changes into neat increments that makes me at a loss to explain how exactly I have changed. Unlike with school, there is no pre and post event that I can pinpoint as truly defining. True, there are some things firmly etched into memory. However, trying to describe how I have changed is akin to wrestling a cloud (the mental imagery makes me wish I could wrestle a cloud…).

Perhaps when we are old and grey and have reached that mythical “later in life”, how will we define everything? I guess time can only tell.