On What I Might Have Become

Sometimes I consider what else I might have pursued if not medicine. It usually begins by compiling a list of some of my marketable skills. Realizing that list is not very long, I quickly move on to considering areas I have tended to enjoy. This list is also short, but it raises a few, concrete ideas: teaching, music, and writing.

~ Teaching ~

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like most students, if they enjoy school, at some point consider becoming a teacher. Aside from my parents, these were the only other adults I saw nearly every day since age four. By the time I was in fifth grade, again aside from my parents, these were adults I began to admire. They encouraged my curiosity, tending to my strings of inarticulate questions. They offered me the extrinsic motivation of grades or prizes or praise.

This was especially true when it came to English class. I felt like my teachers knew me. They were present for all of the stories I created, or the thoughts I shared for the first time to someone outside of my own head.

At this point in time, I would argue that I have had more experience with teaching than with medicine. In eighth grade I was a helper for a student with autism at my Jewish Sunday school (which I only attended for three years). From sophomore year of college through senior year I was a TA for chemistry, and my senior year I was also a biochemistry TA. During this past year I have tutored two students since July and am teaching in an after school program (online) called Anatomy Academy. This is not to bore you with my resume, but rather to illustrate that a consistent chunk of my time has gone towards other students. That being said, I think my experience teaching will benefit and inform my future in medicine.

This is perhaps the most realistic job I would have pursued if not medicine.

~ Music ~

I wouldn’t have deemed myself “good” at music until maybe high school, despite starting piano at four (and a half) and violin at five. My ear was good enough that I knew I sounded bad, but I didn’t possess the patience or diligence to practice enough to fix my errors. I would operate by working until I sounded “good enough” so that my teachers would allow me to either move on in the piece or pick a new one entirely. This looked like fifteen-minute practice sessions or playing through all of my material only once. Sometimes it looked like not practicing for days, then cramming in a long practice session the day before my lesson.

It’s possible this came from a place of considering music as a hobby rather than as a potential future career.

When my ear finally told me: hey, you don’t sound all that screechy or out of tune anymore, I was in high school and already considering medicine. I wonder what could have happened if I had practiced an hour or more every day, if I had found the joy I now find in music, back then?

In college, music was my respite from work. To be fair, I was in orchestra so technically rehearsal was class/work. But it was a space where I got to chat with friends, where we grabbed dinner together after rehearsals, and where I found my first large community of friends.

I felt that in high school as well. Especially after traveling with the orchestra. We endured long rehearsals, practiced on some weekends, and celebrated our accomplishments as a group. It was somewhere in this time that I finally started to enjoy classical music. I’m not sure why I felt the need to like classical music; it is probably similar to why I felt the need to like the taste of tea and coffee, or why I created a list of “classic literature” that I tasked myself with reading. I abandoned the Twilight-s and other young adult novels of my peers in search of books that would make me appear more mature and well-read.

Whether my interest in classical music was organic, or stemmed from thinking I had to like it because I played violin and good musicians listened to it outside of class, or came from my father listening to WOSU’s Classical 101 on the radio, or sprouted from admiring the seeming elitism of classical music, I’m not sure. But now I genuinely enjoy it. For the music, not the sometimes elitism.

When I have long trips ahead of me, I often download an album of classical music along with its score on my computer so I can follow along. Much like someone would flip through the pages of a book, I click through the score as I listen along.

Because music often brings me so much intrigue and enjoyment, I wonder if it’s something I should have tried harder to pursue. But then I remember crying during my lessons (yes, even in college), fuming at myself for doing so, and then still not practicing every day. So then I think, perhaps I do not, in fact, have what it takes to pursue music professionally.

~ Writing ~

Writing has been my form of expression since the sixth grade. I kept journals of the latest goings-on of the middle school drama scene–who I liked, who was mad at who, or anything else of note from that day.

By the time I reached high school, I was revealing a lot in English class. All of the thoughts or stories I had that I was too scared to say out loud, I would write. I would mask truth in fiction, or perhaps reveal truth through fiction, as a way to hide my reality behind made-up names and settings.

This made me gravitate towards my English teachers; the ones who had to read these pieces. I knew they had to engage with what I wrote on some level, if only for a few minutes.

My teachers always told me I was good at writing. Now this doesn’t necessarily translate into employment, but it made me at least consider writing in some capacity in my future. Who wouldn’t want to pursue a career in something they’ve been told they’re good at? I’ve thought about what made my writing good at that time, but I can’t quite articulate it or recognize it myself. All I know is, I have worked into my identity that I’m a decent writer.

I strongly believe that everyone can be a “good” writer. I usually write how I speak, or rather, how I think the more polished me speaks when I plan out sentences in my head. Part of what might make me good is my observation skills. I’d like to think I can pick up on nuances of expression, body language, mood, or environmental changes.

For example, my mother recently got veneers. I had been away at college, but my brothers had been home with her when she got them. However many weeks after she had the procedure and I finally came home, one of the first things I asked her was, “Is there something different about your teeth?” She explained to me the whole, long process of getting veneers, including shaving down her original teeth. During this process, which sounded like an ordeal, my brothers were unaware–or maybe just uninterested–in the slight physical changes of my mom’s front four teeth.

Another small example is when I would return home after a long semester, I would do a once-over of the house and ask my mother about everything that was different. “When did we switch those lamps? Where did the basket go that used to be on the table? Is this closet emptier than it used to be?” Noticing details, or being able to relay them through text, is part of what helps me develop imagery and description.

In the past, I used to think I was creative. After graduating, I find that to be less true. I’m not sure if it’s from melting my brain with hours of YouTube, or from being so tired from schoolwork that I couldn’t muster up the energy or make the time to think creatively, but I felt that all my ideas were boring. Even in my fiction writing classes, I would take stories that were completely true and just change peoples’ names to pass them off as “fiction.”

Fearing a day when I don’t feel creative, or the uncertainty of a future in writing in which I can’t come up with an idea, is what makes me realize I couldn’t pursue a career in writing.

So, I always circle myself back to medicine, no matter how dreamlike or happy futures in these other areas may seem. I have told myself medicine has elements of all of these other jobs, but there’s the added bonuses of the science I spent so much time studying, the fulfilling aspect of helping others, and the constant changes in the field that make it a field of lifelong learning.

But more on why medicine in another post.