Life In Between

Bad habits are hard to break. I thought that with the freedom of being somewhere new, the permission to shed the toxic customs of American surgical training would soon follow. Some were easy to abandon: the crack-of-dawn pre-rounding, the neurotic checking and re-checking of the list, the micro-managing of the OR staff to stave off the attending’s inevitable meltdown if even a single instrument was out of place. But others were peculiarly ingrained in me in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

The most insidious of these was the compulsion to loiter in the resident room after hours, just in case an errant task had been left undone. I would hover behind the registrar’s shoulder, scanning his notes, trying to anticipate his needs. One day he finally snapped. “Why are you still here?”

“Because you are.”

He frowned, confused—a look I had grown familiar with in those first weeks as my old training was being unlearned. “When your work is done, your day is done,” he said simply. “You don’t need my permission to leave. Go home.”

It was such a simple revelation, though one I didn’t know how to act on. I had been trained—implicitly and overtly—that leaving on time was a kind of blasphemy. 

And so, even when I was released, I didn’t know what to do with the freedom.

I’d find myself standing in my living room at 4:30 p.m., still in scrubs, paralyzed by choice. For years, I hadn’t needed a true identity; being a doctor sufficed. It was an all-purpose explanation that excused everything: why I didn’t have real hobbies, why my plants died in under a week, why I missed those drinks or that birthday. The title wasn’t just a profession—it was a hiding place. 

As long as I was a doctor, I didn’t have to be much else.

Not that I didn’t pretend to have interests. My CV was practically bursting with them: competitive swimmer, charity founder, student government member. Each line painted a picture of someone fulfilled, when in reality I wasn’t cultivating interests at all—I was curating bullet points. My downtime was just more uptime in disguise.

So when real freedom finally arrived, without another application to pad on the horizon, I was utterly helpless. Relaxation became its own form of labor. I’d sit with a book I had long meant to read, only to find my brain too noisy to focus, spinning out hypothetical to-do lists that did not need completing. I’d try to binge that show everyone was raving about, but my chest would tighten with the conviction that I should be “using my time” more efficiently. Even a run -- headphones in, a podcast streaming -- felt hollow without the promise of a future race to flaunt in an interview.

Exhaustion had ruled my life in residency. The worst of it wasn’t even the hours, but the constant awareness of how I was perceived. I was told I seemed unhappy, and that observation—casual to others, devastating to me—became a kind of indictment. I began to understand that to fit in, I needed to look fulfilled. Which, of course, made me feel less fulfilled. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By the end of each day I’d have nothing left. Whatever scraps of energy survived the hospital were hoarded, never spent. The idea of meeting new people, however kind or fun they might be, was unbearable. I couldn’t endure the thought of more judgment. And so my world contracted, quietly and steadily, until there was nothing left but work and the hollow recovery from work.

Australia altered that without my realizing it. At first it was subtle: a registrar laughing at a mistake I made instead of chastising me for it. Being allowed to take my time. Making a joke in the middle of rounds and not having it fall flat. My vigilance dialed down; my social battery lasted past the afternoon. And when the day ended, my body was tired in the normal way bodies are tired—not in the bone-deep depletion that had once defined me.

So I found myself saying yes. At first to a group run, of all things. I introduced myself, told pieces of my story, listened to theirs. We made plans for the future. It sounds inconsequential, but to me it was a leap—the proof that I could meet new people without immediately wanting to retreat.

Even dating, once a cringeworthy prospect, became bearable—sometimes even fun. It helped that people liked me at work; that simple fact made it conceivable that someone might like me outside of work, too. I could roll with the turbulence: an excruciating first date arguing American politics, followed weeks later by bar-hopping in my neighborhood, laughter rising like it hadn’t in years, ending in an unanticipated kiss.

These days, my calendar fills itself in healthier ways. Friendships and relationships require time and tending, and I’ve surprised myself with how much I want to give both. The old version of me would have resented the effort, would have seen it as another obligation. 

Now, it feels like life.

Sometimes that means meeting a friend for dinner, or answering a text I would once have ignored. Sometimes it means going for a run with no stopwatch and no future race to justify it. Sometimes it means a date, good or bad, because even a bad date can turn into a good story. Other times it’s quieter: the book I finally finish, the plant I remember to water, the stillness of lying on the couch without the guilt that I should be doing something else. These moments are small, almost laughably so, but I’m starting to see that they are the very things a life is built from.

It took years of training to indoctrinate the belief that my time belonged to the hospital, but only a few months of unlearning to realize that my time belongs to me. And if I’ve discovered anything, it’s that “when work is done” is not the end of the story. It’s where the story finally begins.