The single most sinister element that’s hampered me all along the way, which I assume runs rife within our westernised population, thriving on an infusion of instant technological and financial gratification, is the fear of failure. The fear of regret, the fear that this project will flop, as will the next one, and the fear that the amount of energy and time that I’ve put into it will never be retrievable, so surely my time is better spent doing something else?
As a medical student there is increasingly little time available for anything other than academic and clinical advancement, so I found myself constantly questioning whether those precious morsels of time could be more effectively spent, and it made me so sad. I was never in the moment, enjoying the activity for the simple pleasure of doing something that made me feel good – everything had to be ‘productive’ or set me up in someway for my career to progress in the direction that it should. I don’t even know what ‘should’ means. Did I even want a career? I’d always assumed I had, but it recently struck me that I had spent so much time thinking about what I should do that I hadn’t stopped to think what I wanted. In truth, I have no idea. All I know is that it is going to fulfil the big five, and that’s what I’m going to spend my time doing.
unicyclemedic 