It was an ordinary evening, we had enjoyed a lovely supper, and were engaged in the after-dinner discussion of the day. There was nothing to foreshadow the bomb that was coming my way… ‘you know’ said Nancy, ‘you left Texas to come someplace new…. And to do something different than you were doing in Texas… but it looks to me like you have recreated that life on PEI….’ She was right, and it had not even taken two years. I had come with the dream of finally setting boundaries between my work and the rest of my life, and finding balance between the two. I had walked away from the busy academic career to restart my medical practice and ‘get it right’ this time. But here I was, once again doing what I had always done…. Filling my life so completely that there was no room for all of it and certainly no room for anything else, medicine had once again taken over.
Are you listening...
There is was again, the anger, arising from seemingly nowhere, red hot and ready for battle. Why is it here again, and what can I do to help keep it at bay? It would come up suddenly, and in that moment of recognition I would stop and look to see where this anger came from, why it arose once again. What a frustrating process this was, each time I would look it seemed that I saw only blank walls with no path forward. Again and again I would return to this quandary, looking for the way in, the path to understanding, knowing where this anger came from and why.....