Dropping that Medical Dream: Half Courage, Half Conscience

It would be futile to write about my year and create a summary to compress my 2012. Honestly, I am personally unable to remember most of what is supposedly shareable that happened to me last year and I do not find it ideal to welcome the new year by recounting whatever the lapses of my memory have missed.

I have decided to share something I personally find as earth-shaking, monumental, deracinating, and brave to celebrate a new year.

From a restaurant I ate at with good friends. They closed after a while though but the place was a beauty.

I shifted out of premed.

I have been a science junkie since elementary when a psychological test confirmed the disillusionment of my childhood: I am scientifically inclined and gifted, at least to a certain extent. Apart from tearing my head apart grasping the concept of multiplication that decreases (when multiplying a whole number by a fraction<1), I underwent separate training in the mathematics and sciences for competitions. It was later agreed that going on to a specialized (and exclusive) science high school was the best for my future.

Come high school, I was intent on failing every subject. It was a struggle that I always was convinced will never be worth it. A foreshadowing maybe. When my grades did climb, it was because I was enjoying introductory mechanics in physics, the kind of enthusiasm good enough to overflow towards other “lesser” courses. Lost in it all, I decided I wanted to become a doctor.

Everyone I knew, or my closest friends at least, all wanted to become medical doctors. My parents and even the extended family joined the chorus. "Be a doctor! Be a doctor!". The cooing dug a hole I immediately fell in.

Getting into a premed courses in all the schools I applied to, I was convinced that it was meant to be. I even bought my own stethoscope a few months before with the excuse it was required for a co-curricular activity. Finally, I was done with high school, proudly waving a less-than-average report card.

As if just an extension of the four years in high school, college became a torment. 

I believed the hell would be over once I step into a university, pursuing a concentration of my own choosing. I was wrong. I chose premed and I wasn't enjoying myself. In fact, I would rather bury myself in dusty piles of books about Sylvia Plath, a poet who has always fascinated me since high school, than go to class. I spent sleepless nights of allergen-triggered asthma mustering over details of her life, definitely irrelevant to whatever battery of tests my premed degree deemed necessary. In times of trouble where there seems no escape, I transport into a different existence mumbling “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God” as if the beautiful feeling of the phrase rolling off the tongue is the taste of salvation.

Of course, my grades turned out to be very nauseating, even for my desensitized self.

Partly because I couldn't imagine myself ending my career in the academe with a tragic report card, and largely because I was sure that I couldn't be a doctor, and couldn't stand anymore the rigidity of science (the ultimate desire for a certain truth), I decided to shift out.

I was prepared if I sensed defeat or disappointment from my parents. Who wouldn't parade a doctor son? And strangely, it is so easy for me to imagine the emotions of having a son who grew up playing doctor suddenly deciding to become a hobo.

I did not exactly decide to be a hobo but it is a common joke around my new classmates here in the university. A career in English literature, although undeniably hopeful, is currently a financial desert. My materialistic tendencies were also one of the strongest weights that kept me in premed.

Although now, with a wonderful professor who guides me into getting lost in T. S. Eliot’s words, introduces me to Milan Kundera, keeps me safe from Madame Bovary’s seduction, and challenging me with the densest sentences I have ever seen, I couldn’t be any happier. I have this belief that in my struggles defining what I really want from all the external forces, I acquired early onset identity crisis. I had a hard time pointing out where I was in life but now, as a literature major learning an average of five new words a day, I seem more optimistic and it’s not just because of the bliss that baptizes every good decision.

There is one certain thing that I learned from this whole mess I have created (which I kind of cleaned up afterwards): discernment is not easy for everyone.

Unfortunately, I think I’m one of the tougher cases. The world is so full of external pressures that it becomes hard to define where yourself ends and other people begin but it is possible and it all begins with a boldness, a certain courage to look in the mirror and dig deep (eek! sentimental!). Of course, there is also conscience. I think there is genetic precedence in our desire to protect ourselves. I was shredding myself through something that I knew wasn’t really for me, it was destroying me instead of sharpening the mass inside my head. If all of these are false, there is one thing in me that made me jump out of my hole: conscience.