Directions

After reading several blogs by various people (friends, strangers, colleagues) I've come to the realization that I don't have much direction on my blog. I don't really have any set theme in my head that I'm trying to follow. Not that this is a good thing or a bad thing, just an observation.

Right now I've been using it more or less to relate things going on in my life to friends I don't necessarily talk with or see very often. In a way, it's become a replacement for talking on the phone or making an effort to go out with people outside of Chuck's friends. Ever since vet school graduation, I've felt somehow inadequate compared to most of the friends I used to have. Actually it probably started long before that. I know it's all in my head, but it still haunts me that I was one of the few in my class to graduate without a job and remain in the Champaign area instead of moving on. When initially looking for jobs after graduation, I was criticized for not having done many practical externships during senior year or the summers between years (although I was working full time in the summer and held two jobs during the school year for most of vet school). Since being let go from my most recent job, I have not really talked to many of my close friends because I feel uncomfortable reminding myself that they have jobs-they've succeeded-where I've failed. I'm not good at taking criticism of that sort.

The lack of direction on my blog is a reflection of my life at the moment. I've always had a list in my head of how my life is going to go, ie I'm going to graduate high school and go to a large college, I'm going to finish college in 3 years and go to vet school, I'm going to graduate vet school and get married, then work. Unfortunately that's about as far as I ever got in my daydreams-nothing beyond that. Well, now I'm beyond that and I don't have my plan anymore-no long term goals so to speak. It scares the crap out of me. I don't know what I want to do with my life, where things always used to be so definate in getting from point A to point B. I no longer have a point B. And I don't know what to do to fix that.

I've thought a lot about my options now that I don't really have a job. One of the big things I've been thinking about is doing a residencey. Then the question becomes "In what? Where? How to get one?" My biggest interests in my field are exotics, pathology, and laboratory animal medicine. Unfortunately the hurdles to getting advanced training in these fields are huge. I don't have the people to make the recommendations, I don't have the experience I would need to open doors, I don't have as much support at home as I need to get the experience or the actual position, and I'm stuck in the Champaign area. To top it all off, I'm not mentally prepared to give up some parts of veterinary medicine to pursue the others. All of the fields I'm interested in mesh together, but it involves giving up the personal interactions with pet owners and individual patients for the more academic and scientific side of medicine. In searching for a job and doing interviews, I've discovered that I need to start making some of these decisions. One of the jobs I'm looking at involves no hands-on work at the level of the patient. I don't know if I'm prepared to step back at this point in my career.

Hopefully I'll be able to figure out my directions soon and get my thoughts and life back on track.