A little about Me
By: The Anonymous Doctor
Tags: My Story, Journaling, Personal Development, Self Discovery, Mental Health

All my life I have never really considered myself as creative or artistic. I have always been a person of science and numbers. Preferring the concreteness and safety of equations to the ambiguities of humanities, I ventured down the track of Medicine from an early age. Though fascinated by the human body and human condition, I managed to, seemingly unconsciously, successfully redirect my attention from my own mind-body pain to others. In focusing my attention to myriad human diseases and cures, I achieved a sense of self-growth and accomplishment. If I was a successful doctor, managing to help the sick and vulnerable how could I be unhealthy or feel unsettled? This disabling paradox facilitated my ignorance to my suffering for many, many years.

In some ways, some may consider me successful. Objectively, I am relatively wealthy, educated, tall and somewhat of an overachiever. As well as practicing medicine, I am CEO and co-founder of a start-up and manage a diverse investment portfolio. I am a child, partner, parent and landlord all for good measure too. In short, I am many roles and many things to many different people. But I am confused. I am high-functioning but I am highly anxious. I am safe and yet I am fearful. I am hopeful and yet I despair. I should be happy but I am not. Amidst all of this so-called success and achievement remains at the very core of my being an unhappy, insecure, anxious, pained person. On a daily basis I fight in the trenches and recesses of my mind for the elusive happiness, meaning and acceptance I crave so dearly. Having had the realisation that much of the external wealth and success I have accrued has not satisfied this need, I began to explore the world within me. To take more seriously the inner workings of my mind and embark on the quest for some self-actualisation and wisdom.

I have sampled the volumes of personal development material and have quite a few bumper-sticker slogans up my sleeve. Not to say that these insights have not been life-changing (because they have!) but rather that knowledge is not the same as acceptance or application. In other words, I may be able to talk the talk but often struggle to walk the walk. One such proclamation being “You will cry tears of gratitude when you realise that your healing journey was the path home to yourself”. I believe this and hope that when I look back I will see the loving wing of cosmic direction yet I know that I am in pain at my current location and I’m struggling to see light at the end of the tunnel. I have enmeshed my reality with pain for so long that it is difficult to remember tranquility and ease. Like a drop of colouring transforms a bathtub of water so too a flicker of pain clouds a life experienced.

Many may consider my journalling a contradiction. The conclusions I have reached at odds with other utterances. Yet, is it such a surprise? How many contradictions do we hold in our own lives as humans? How much cognitive dissonance do we experience? How many do we overcome seamlessly, allowing them to untrouble and wash over us? One commonly unacknowledged (and completely unjudged!) example of this include animal lovers who consume the objects of their affections. The crude point of this example is simply that I fully expect and hope to encounter some of these as I document my thoughts and feelings. I hope that they allow me to unlock different doors and free me from some of the mental constructs which have been sabotaging my wellbeing. I hope that if you read this, you do so in the knowledge that it is a true and accurate account of my feelings at this time and the biases that I currently hold. I hope that you can find compassion and forgiveness for yourself and me as I expose many of my imperfections and those which plague, I am sure, many of us that we seldom acknowledge.