Memento Mori: Taking Stock of Where I Am

You all know I’m an overachiever. You may not know that I am a people pleaser, and along with being an overachiever, this creates situations where I set fairly unreasonable goals for myself.

I have been in a reflective mood this week, maybe because it was my birthday and my eldest child’s birthday recently. I was thinking about a time when I was very pregnant with her as a third-year resident.

What They Thought vs What I Wanted

At the time, I was a newlywed and getting ready to match for my fellowship (along with being 34 weeks pregnant). I was on an oncology rotation and felt really encouraged by the attending doctors on that rotation, who had told me, “You have good hands. You’re definitely the oncologist type.”

Wanting to please them, I had been planning to match with an oncology fellowship. Becoming an oncologist requires three to four more years of training BEYOND regular physician training, and these were the programs I was researching.

The snag in this plan was that my then-husband was training to become a colorectal surgeon.

He was going to graduate a year apart from me. We were about to have a baby. If I followed through with my plan of matching with an oncology program, he and I would have to live apart for a year, while we had a newborn.

Reality Check From My Intern

Maybe I was in denial, or maybe I was just so focused on what other people wanted for me, but I thought, “Oh well, no big deal.” Thankfully my intern called me out on this. We were sitting there on the night shift together, as I rested this pile of papers about the oncology fellowships on my very pregnant belly, and she snatched them out of my hands.

“What are you doing? Look at you! Do you really want to spend another three or four years in training?” And I finally really thought about it for myself. Not for the residents’ expectations of me but for myself. I realized, “No, actually, I do NOT! I think it’d be really great to just have my baby, and finish my training, and see how I feel.” And she said, “Yeah. Maybe you should do that.” This might have been another example of waiting until someone else gave me permission to do what I wanted before I gave MYSELF permission, but that’s another blog post (Giving Ourselves Permission).

Moving the Goalposts

Trying to do more, be more, live up to others’ expectations of me, is the story of my life, at least since high school. I think there are plenty of us in academics and in medicine who are a little addicted to the satisfaction of achieving. (Really, that might be more of an American obsession, but I see it from these two lenses.) There have been many times in my training where I listened to someone else’s assessment that I might be good at this or that, even though I already have a specialty and plenty of work in that field.

And even now, I might see a job posting that seems fascinating, and I will honestly consider taking three hours to fill out an application for a job that doesn’t fit and that I’d be unlikely to get. I see it as a competition with myself, that I always need to be raising the stakes and doing something more. But how exhausting that way of thinking is! When will my achievements be enough? And when can I think about what I really want, versus what I think other people might want of me?

Networking is Hard Work

As I mentioned, we celebrated both my and my eldest child’s birthday earlier this week. Though I wisely took a day off work for my birthday, this meant I was trying to catch up on work that night. On top of that work, my husband planned a special birthday celebration for me, AND I was asked to attend a networking event on behalf of my new product launch. I was feeling overwhelmed.

I will be honest: even though I’m an extrovert, I was not that excited about networking. After you’ve spent all day working, driving somewhere to meet and chat with new people takes a lot of energy. I thought, “I have too much work to do, I’m too tired, I’m not going to go.”

But I went anyway, and I was so glad that I did. The venue was small, and many of my oldest colleagues and friends were there, which was a pleasant surprise. And, it gave me the chance to see my career and my accomplishments through their eyes.

It is Enough

Understanding my accomplishments from that outside perspective helped me understand how far I’ve come and how much progress I’ve made on this product (but in other parts of my life as well). Even though from the inside I always feel like there is more to do and I haven’t done “enough,” in reality, it HAS been enough. My work has come so far!

There is a Latin phrase, memento mori, that translates to “remember you’re going to die.” People in certain religious communities keep this phrase in mind as a means of perspective on what really matters in their lives and how they should be living each day. What are their values, and are they living up to them?

In his own way, my dad had a similar phrase that he repeated quite often: “I could die tomorrow.” It was his way of saying, “I’m happy with what I have accomplished, I feel satisfied with where I am.” And after seeing all those people and taking stock of my accomplishments from their perspective, I think I can say the same thing. I could die tomorrow, and it has been enough.