Back at Medical School....
I was informed by a friend that my forgetfulness as regards cross-posting to InsaneJournal may be interpreted as wilful neglect. ;P And so, I am going to copy/paste a post I made on LiveJournal a couple of days ago - one of those uncharacteristically rambling introspective ones. Yeah, one of those ones.

So after an absence of two years, I am back at medical school... and wow, do I feel it! I am already scrabbling desparately to revise the basics, stuff that I know I should be able to spout off the top of my head by now.

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Lizard gets introspective...

The last three years have been rather disastrous, academically, and I felt particularly miserable because I absolutely hated my Surgery rotation - and Surgery was the reason I wanted to be a doctor in the first place. I felt I'd lost my vocation. :( I even thought for a while if Medicine was the right career for me, if I was having such a rough time. Surely I couldn't achieve future job satisfaction if I was constantly struggling to understand the basics?

I considered other fields of Medicine that I could get into, something to renew that vocational spark. I thought about a career in Pathology, but honestly, I was never that good at histology and microscopy, and as much as I tried to convince myself, I would far rather work with live people, not scraps of tissue on a slide. I thought about General Practice, but that didn't excite me either. The other clinical rotations I had experienced so far were equally unappealing to me - not surprising, considering how crappy I felt about myself and my abilities at the time.

Then the shit hit the fan - I irreversibly failed my exams one year. Talk about wake-up call. :(

I needed to take a step back. I needed to experience something outside of the draining Medical School environment, where I felt nothing but inadequate and unworthy.

And so I did. Best fuckin' decision I've ever made in my life. :D I took a gap year with permission from the Medical School. I worked, I earned money, I garnered respect from my colleagues, I was independent and responsible and succeeding - I even loaned money to my mother, and I could sense that she saw me as more of an equal because of that. And then I went on my epic adventure across America, and had the most amazing time. All in all, I learned a lot of transferable skills, and most importantly, I gained confidence in the intelligence of my own brain.

And that was very centring, really. I looked back on my poor performance at uni, and I began to understand why I went wrong, and what I could do to fix it. It wasn't because I was just too stupid and irresponsible to deal with the rigours of Med School. I came to understand that my lack of friends in real life had translated to an addiction to my fandom activites and friends, taking time and interest away from my difficult course. It wasn't that the Surgery module was bad (I say to myself), but perhaps I was in the wrong place emotionally to learn and appreciate the subject.

So.

Here I am. Back at school, a week into my 5th year of Medicine, and I feel... ready. Not ready academically, but ready to begin piecing together and relearning everything I missed out on. It's going to be horribly difficult, it will take a lot of work (double the amount of my normal work load), it will involve missing out on fandom fun, and being even more isolated in university....

But you know what, I don't care! I don't need any new RL friends! They're all smart and far too normal. xD And fandom is wonderful and glorious, but I don't feel so awfully addicted to it anymore - I know fandom is there, I know I have friends here, (I hope) you won't all disappear if I am largely unproductive due to the pressures of school. (Not that I will be totally unproductive - I am not that capable of giving up on fandom!)

Whew. Anyway. I don't really know why I wrote out this post - I guess I just wanted to put into words the thoughts that have been in my head. Because I feel like I'm on the cusp of really changing my future. I can turn this disastrous failure I experienced into something positive. And not only that, I can do WELL, dammit. I know I can. I won't be the best - sadly, I ruined my chances of such a thing with my failure - but I think I can gain enough ground to be averagely decent. Upper end of average, even. I know I can - I just have to work for it.

I hate using cliches, but I feel I have really turned over a new leaf. Like today, I had a free afternoon, and instead of going straight home to muck around on the internet and draw fanart, I bounced into the library and did some catch-up revision. And I felt cheerful about it! I enjoyed it, even, because at heart, I am still a huge old science geek.

But srsly, I can't remember ever being cheerful about revising. WTF. It was a lovely feeling. ^__^ ♥