"It's Fun to Have Fun" by MSIH first year blogger Jon Rom

Have you ever felt nervous right before going on a roller coaster? The tall, mechanical loops and repeating soundtrack of squeals and screams that entice you on the drive over suddenly make you unsure of your choices. You start to sweat and your heart-rate climbs while you anticipate the mechanical beast you’re about to forfeit your fleeting sense of security to. You fill with dread, you get dizzy and your eyes lose focus. You feel lost even though you’re exactly where you wanted to be.

If you can imagine that, I ask you to extend that sensation over weeks or months and then appreciate that this is what medical school feels like for a procrastinator. You’re welcome to wonder how chronic procrastinators get into med-school, but I assure you we are an invasive species. There is no pride in it, nor should there be but, somehow, we who delay the inevitable always seem to find ourselves getting by just fine.

But it’s not fine, not really. Regardless of habits and skills, within all of us is a preservation-based compulsion to ignore what we find distressing and painful. With that instinct comes a complimentary sense of impending doom and responsibility. The innate sense of “do what you gotta do, even if you don’t wanna” is a mix of these two internal forces that creates a similar roller-coaster hesitancy as I described above. A sort of amusement park nausea of the soul, if you will.

There are consequences to this prolonged, corrosive helplessness. Many students are swallowed by a “Black Hole of Academic Despair” as coined by my eleventh-grade Chemistry teacher, Mrs. Silverberg. She would describe the cycle as such: you procrastinate, you feel guilty, you anguish in your guilt and force yourself to recede further into the escapism that caused this mess in the first place, you repeat. This pattern continues until you feel like a beam of light unable to escape from the tremendous density of a black hole (yes, physics analogies from a chemistry teacher. I went to an interesting high school).

It’s quite dramatic. These theatrics of the mind play out in the best of us, and is as indiscriminate as infectious disease. So how do you vaccinate yourself against despair?

Get interested. I’ll admit it doesn’t sound like much of a solution after the grandeur of what I just described, but I swear by it all the same. For years I have been putting this skill to work to cope with my pervasive inability to focus on my work. To quote the wise Justin McElroy, a minor celebrity from Huntington, West Virginia: “Learning to appreciate things you don’t initially enjoy is the power to fill the world with stuff you like.”

When you can recognize what stimulates your mind and what doesn’t, you can forge the world into what you like. This learnable skill makes your work into play, as described in Delivered from Distraction by Drs. Hallowell and Ratey. The boring becomes fun because you are no longer forcing yourself to complete tasks you dislike.

It’s alright not to like studying. Some do but it isn’t for everybody, including myself. I personally like story-telling and narratives. However when I learn medicine my brain doesn’t go into study mode, it is instead gripped by the drama of the lowly microbe, the intrepid glucose molecules, and the fussy T-cell. I play with my material by employing personification, I create characters that are now part of my game.

This is just one example, there are many ways you can harmonize your creative stimuli with your academia. A song, drawing, an intricate puppet show are all fine ways to get out of the mindset that learning is an inevitable chore. The only barrier isn’t a lack of creativity, but your willingness to be silly.

A crucial step in the training of the budding physician is to learn to let go of illusions of self-importance. I know this because I have been lucky enough to meet such humble doctors, and they are each brilliant and kind. Besides, nobody cares why you understand the material, just thatyou understand it. Once you accept that, med-school can become the enriching experience you worked so hard for.

Or it won’t. It won’t and it will have very little to do with your aptitude or ability to be silly. There is a caveat to all this worth mentioning and that is some might not actually care for medicine. You might even realize that while you’re crafting your Immunology Puppet Show Theatre sets well into studying for your USMLEs.

That’s fine. I mean that, it really is fine to decide you will never like something. If medicine isn’t for you then go do something that excites you and be amazing at it. Go have fun and never look back. In a post full of quotes and idea from people smarter than me, allow me to drop one of my own nuggets of truth: You have every right to love what you do, but very few of us are privileged enough to get it right the first time. Feel free to quote me on that when you hit it big, it’ll make a good story I can tell my patients.