Revaluating my life and Growing Up

 It’s funny how different I feel today than I did 2 weeks ago. I never realized how much my perspective can change just due to a couple of dates with a very insightful guy. I feel more awake, and more like the person I was before I become very very cynical about life and started repressing all emotions that ever existed because they were too painful.

I have a course this weekend, and instead of doing what I usually do, which is commuting for 2 hours each way as this course is in another city, I decided to rent a hotel room and make it a mini well-deserved vacation! It’s actually been really helpful in having some peace and quiet to really think about things and figure things out about the issues in my life, and where I want to go from here, as well as what I really want, which I’m still not completely sure about.

So this guy whom I will call Freud for a reason, has challenged my whole perception of my life and made me realize I’m a mess and my brain is a mess. I have ignored so many health issues for so long that I have started taking them for granted and thinking its all normal, which is ridiculous. I mean having constant stomach upsets, no appetite and not being able to eat anything for 2 months other than a diet of baked potatoes, chicken, and toast is ridiculous. Having to eat 20 chocolates a day to stay awake is also crazy. Working 50-60hours/week and commuting is unsustainable and will lead to burnout. Being anxious to the point of having anxiety attacks and not being able to communicate is also far from normal. Being so exhausted that I was falling asleep all the time, because of only getting 6 hours of sleep is just not healthy.

The crazy thing, is I advise my clients all the time about changing their lifestyle and making sure they take their health seriously. I harp on them to de-stress, to do their exercises, and to make sure to come in right when they are injured instead of a year later, I always tell them to exercise, keep fit, sleep well, lose weight, to really take care of their body because they only have the one, and not taking care of it will be problematic later on. Now here I am, completely ignoring my own advise! I mean, not only do I not exercise, I work ridiculous hours, don’t sleep enough, overwork myself, and have horrible eating habits and major digestive issues. I am also stressed to the max, very anxious, and was wondering why I was getting frustrated at the smallest thing, and was getting annoyed listening to my clients very real concerns. All I could think about was how I really wanted to get home and go to bed.

He made me realize how ridiculous my life was, and how I’m slowly running my self to the ground. I mean I need to live in my body for the next 40 years, how can I expect it to run properly if I don’t take care of it? So, I did start to clean up my life, starting with my diet, and looking at it, I realized I eat very few vegetables and get few nutrients from potatoes, so I added eating 3 full salads a day, cut out the chocolates, added vitamin B12 to get my appetite back, and stopped eating baked potatoes. I still have to add pro-biotics, vitamin D, yogurt and most likely see a dietician to determine what else I am missing in my diet. But those steps alone, made me stop falling asleep all the time at work, and have reduced the stomach upsets, although they still occur once in a while after eating out in restaurants. I mean when I really think about the fact that I was skipping lunch, and thinking it was ok to eat lunch at 5pm, I wonder how I didn’t completely collapse from exhaustion!

After diet, came my work, I mean I have realized I work, way too many hours, and I can’t keep this up if I truly want a balanced lifestyle. So I have started blocking my schedule, and will transition to taking Friday’s off, as well as only working a half-day on Saturday, so that will hopefully reduce my hours to a more regular 40hour work week, and will give me more time off. I mean it’s one thing to work 50-60hours, but its another to try to work + take courses + try to date and exercise + keep up with cooking and cleaning. At first I was addicted to the paycheck and seeing my balance going up every month, but after a while I didn’t care anymore, I was so exhausted and worn out, I felt it was a chore to actually go and put the check in the bank. I was getting more and more fatigued and impatient, and not a very pleasant person to be around. What’s the point of money if you have no energy to enjoy it? What’s the point if you’re gonna burn out in a year and not want to work anymore at all?

Now, the diet and work is actually fairly easy to fix, my emotional and anxiety issues are a lot more complicated and I’ve been ignoring them for so long, that it will take me a while to deal with everything. I mean I didn’t even realize I was that anxious and sensitive until I started hyperventilating during sex…I mean that tells me something. Yes, I was nervous, but apparently that’s actually not that common.

So I’ve started by just identifying when I am anxious, what triggers it, what emotions I’m feeling, and then instead of blocking my emotions and getting more and more anxious, I’ve learned to accept them and let them go. If I’m feeling unsure, insecure, incompetent at work, I realized that’s okay and that everyone feels this, and I don’t need to try to suppress it. I think the main issue, was that I had horrible placements at school, and many of my ‘teachers’ instead of actually ‘teaching me skills’ just criticized me. They constantly told me that I’m not strong enough, smart enough, althletic enough, confident enough, can’t multi-task, get distracted, poor memory..etc…and I internalized all those ideas even if it was just a few people’s opinions and it was during a time of great stress.

It took another person, to make me realize that they should not have done that, and weren’t doing any teaching whatsoever. I mean it’s been a year since I finished the program and those thoughts were still playing over and over in my head. I’ve treated countless number of clients, have been told how much they appreciate my expertise and a person that actually listens to their concerns and takes their problems seriously, and have fairly good outcomes, yet I still hear their voice in my head, telling me that I’m not good enough. I mean how can I become competent, if I don’t even believe that I’m good enough myself? So, I’ve learned to accept that their ideas telling me I’m not good enough, or not competent enough will always be there, but I can choose to ignore them now and let them go, because otherwise I won’t be able to move on, and become confident in my own ideas as a therapist. I will always have the fear that I’m not providing the best service and someone else can do a better job, and initially when I started, all I wanted to do was refer everyone to a different more knowledgeable therapist, but I realize now that they don’t necessarily do a better job. They don’t have 100% success rate either, and every person and therapist has different skills, and different treatment styles. There is a lot of disagreement, but different doesn’t necessarily mean bad, it just means different, and different people respond to different therapies, so my style is not necessarily less effective than theirs.

The next step, that I’m also working on, and will take a while is to start to separate my life from my parent’s lives and to start taking responsibility for my own actions. That means not blaming my problems on them and learning to move on from there. It also means accepting that I didn’t have the easiest childhood, but that doesn’t mean that it has to define who I am today. No immigrant’s childhood is perfect, and I should consider myself lucky in general. Yes my parents were/are overprotective, very anxious about every little thing, and worried about me, but I know that is their way of really loving me, and protecting me. I mean, I was sick a lot when I was younger, and my immunity was not the greatest, so I can see why they are nervous, but at the same time, I’m not a kid anymore. I’m an adult, with a successful career, and I need to create some boundaries with respect to going out, and them texting me non-stop, it does get ridiculous after a while. I also have to take more responsibility and not letting them do everything for me like I’m used to. I need to start doing my own laundry, cleaning, waking up on my own, going to bed at a regular time, making my own food and buying my own supplies. It also means, paying rent regularly. If I want to be taken seriously as an adult, I have to actually start acting like one, and stop acting like a kid that needs to be taken care of. It’s a lot of change, but the sooner I start, the better, because otherwise, I’ll be stuck in the rut forever.

I can definitely see why people move out, because as much as I love my parents, I have to develop my own identity. I can’t keep trying to match their expectations, because it’s not who I am. They’re anxiety is causing my anxiety to spike, and that is very very unhealthy. I realized that one of the reasons why I can’t seem to move on from my past experiences is because my mom keeps reminding me of them. We talk about them to death, when sometimes the best thing we can do, is just leave them in the past and move on. We can’t keep living a life in the past, there is the whole future to consider! I do owe them a lot, and I wouldn’t be where I am, without they’re support and encouragement, and even some of the protection they gave me, but I have to take steps to move on slowly forward and set some emotional boundaries.

The biggest thing that I need to do is to accept my career choice and stop running. In the back of my head, I continue to think about med, and this is significant this year, because my MCAT actually expires (not that its any good) and if I wanted to reapply I’d need to retake it. Now even if I apply this year, it would only be to one school, and my shot of getting in is very very low. I actually only thought about applying to get it over with, so that I don’t get in, and then can say that I actually applied and be able to move on with my life. This is actually a ridiculous thought process, because I’m applying not because I want to get in, but because I need to not get in? A friend made me realize, my approach is not exactly correct, and I have to actually want to go, before I apply, and after thinking about it, as much as I complain about my job, I do actually like it. To spend another 6 years studying and working 60hour weeks, and go 100K into debt, does not sound that appealing anymore. Plus I honestly don’t know if I’d even survive it, because my health is already a mess, and I don’t deal with stress very well, that much I realized, so it will probably make me miserable, more fatigued, and more sick.

My friend is currently in dental school, and it was her dream to become a dentist for the longest time, but the last time I talked to her, she actually mentioned she regretted her decision to go. I couldn’t believe it, but the fact is, she is in the US, without her family, going 450K into debt, is exhausted and not doing very well in her classes. She said, if she was warned about how hard it would be, she would find something else to do. It made me realize that I need to accept the decision I made 4 years ago, to not pursue medical school, and go into PT, and not look back and not try to change it. The master’s program alone, has taken away a lot of my sanity already, and I am still not quite where I need be mentally. To spend another 6 years of my life, slaving away over books and hospitals, might actually kill me.

I have a fairly good career, I enjoy my job, and I’m only a year into it and making 70K, what else do I really want? There is a lot of opportunity whether I want to go to different clinics, or whether I want to open up my own clinic, the possibilities are endless. My 50-60hour work weeks, made me realize that money isn’t everything. If I’m exhausted and miserable, the money does not make me happier. More money also doesn’t necessarily solve all of my problems, especially if I hate the job. I’m in general an emotional person, and don’t even enjoy dealing with very sick patients, so to do that every day, will make me quite miserable, and emotionally I would probably shut down again, which will not serve my patient’s best interests. I know enough burned out docs, and I don’t want to be another one.

Now the last thing in my life that I need to figure out is whether I want/can handle an actual relationship. I think this is probably the hardest thing for me because it is not as easy to decide and figure out as all my other life changes because it’s not just me that’s involved. Emotionally it is very difficult for me to get involved, because I’m terrified of being vulnerable, letting go, and getting hurt. I’m so used to guarding my true feelings, and I realized in a real relationship, you can’t do that. You have to learn to let go, take risks, see where they go, and be able to accept the fact that it might not work out. The feelings are so powerful that they tend to overwhelm me, and makes me very difficult to function normally. At the same time, I long for that type of deep relationship that I’ve never been able to find, for that deep intimacy, and for the companionship and emotional connection that comes with a true relationship.