No longer a third year medical student

This is a blog with a focus on Otago Medical School yet most of my posts are outside of University dates, the paradox isn’t lost on me. It isn’t the placidity of University life, it’s more that I feel I could not match the emotional highs and lows of the liver transplant that became my life the better part of last year’s holidays. In a narcissistic squandering of time, I googled this blog, to see what kind of tiny tiny place I hold in the www. In the small google description is this “Vein Asian Blogs About Otago Medical School” and NOT “Vein Asian blogs about his emotions”. With that burden off my shoulders, I’m back.

I was hit with an overdose of lethargy over the course of this year. For so much of this year…. let me just give you an excerpt from a draft that I never published because … well it’s painfully obvious below.

“I’ve  been sitting in front of my laptop since 2 p.m., minus the time for cooking and eating dinner, that’s a solid 10 hours I’ve devoted my day to to be in the perfect place to start some studying.  Instead, I have indulged in everything else you could do by yourself in a room: stare at neighbours,  stare at my wall, stare back at my neighbours being noisy and use it as an excuse to zone out to my own music, facebook, MSN, read up on the latest sporting news, games, watching TV shows then just as I was about to finish with my procrastination, I decided that I should watch House as my ’studying’.

What’s even more amazing is that I had first started this post at the beginning of April… It’s 3 days from June, and so little has changed. I can’t say nothing, as something must’ve changed to prompt me to finish this piece that’s been in draft form for 2 months straight.”

Caught in a self-sprung trap, I felt inadequacy without study. I had mistakenly let the hours of study I did during the day to determine the worth of my life. In retrospect, I should’ve picked anything but, I mean, I showered for a longer time than I studied. It defies logic that the awful feeling at the end of a fruitless day wasn’t enough to make me change the day after, but the world of movies, music, games and friends was too easy to be completely immersed in during the day, and it took until the end of the day for me to feel that familiar sinking feeling of throwing my hours away. A real problem of having too many hobbies is that when I feel that I’ve spent way too much doing one, I can too easily switch onto doing another. During this change, the variability had my mind never feeling a deficit, a deficit that would’ve had me studying.

For some of you, at first glance there seems nothing wrong with the previous paragraph. For most of you, you’d immediately see how flawed my paradigm was, it took me a good seven months.