Once, while discussing the stages of development in Psychiatry back in second year, a doctor-professor of ours commented how medical students are in a stage of extended adolescence. I can’t help but agree. At 20 years plus, it’s a little embarrassing to admit how most of us in medical school are still dependent on our parents and haven’t saved up – not even a dime – for our future. I’m actually one of them.

To tell you frankly, I don’t exactly feel the pressure of draining my parents’ bank account – at least not when I’m with fellow doctors-to-be but when I’m out on my own and venturing into the world beyond the four pillars of the medical school building, it’s entirely a different thing. I don’t exactly feel proud that I am still a leecher in the family despite my age especially when you have a mother who bore a child a month before she turned 22. At times when I catch myself comparing myself to my mom when she was the same age as I am, I couldn’t help but be really disappointed of who I am now. The feeling of hopelessness and seeming lackluster kind of life that I am living at the moment gets more magnified when I’m with former classmates and friends outside the med circle who are already living real lives, earning real money and seeing the real world with their own eyes.

Sometimes it gets really sad. Doubles when you’re faced with tons of patient papers waiting to be submitted, and triples when exams are just a week away.

My friends have long gotten tired of my endless whining about how my life seems to be at a standstill.  My ears have gotten accustomed to words of “jealousy” and “amazement” from them for the larger-than-life kind of world I am living . They’ve already ran out of encouraging words to coax me out my dark cave of self-pity. My brain has already mastered the art of selective processing by masking out phrases like “this-is-just-for-the-moment-you’ll-see-where-this-leads-to-after”.

For Chrissake, I have a vivid image of where this is leading to. It’s not really the future that I am hating. It’s the moment. This snail-paced inching forward my life is taking now.

If I had my way, I’d turn the hands of time and fast forward to ten years from now – the time when I’d probably start seeing the fruits of my hard work. Too bad I am living in reality and nowhere near that is possible. Heck, I couldn’t even trade places with anyone at the moment. So probably, staying within the inner circle of med colleagues is still the best thing to do – at least for now.

unaware-soldierly