blast from the past

Today I had lunch with a friend from school. We hadn’t seen each other since the day we left high school six years ago. It was ’surreal but nice’. [Name the film, I dare you!]

We talked about what we’ve been up to. We talked about people we knew at school, and what we hear of them. A lot of people seem to have kids. Not many are married (only one in fact). It’s very different from my friends at uni, where a lot are married and nobody has kids. It’s so strange to think of us all as big grown-up people.

It seems to me, from what we talked about, that not that many people are happy doing what they are doing. When did we all stop dreaming? So many of them seem to be working in jobs that they don’t like, or faffing about because they don’t know what to do with their lives. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing what you want to do, we’re only young (we are. We ARE.), but it makes me sad to think that people are unhappy.

I know how lucky I am that I knew from a very early age what I wanted to do (I think I was four, I had teddy bear hospitals with toilet roll bandages and traction and everything), and I’m lucky that I had the motivation to get on with getting there. It’s much easier to get good grades when you have a goal. High school for me was a get-in-get-grades-get-to-med-school affair. I didn’t enjoy it much, mainly because this kind of determination was not common at my school, and so I got picked on a fair bit, and I’m sure it made me less popular that I stayed at home to study rather than going out on the town with school friends.

But you know what? I’m about to start my dream job. I made it to med school (by the grace of God, it seems, because if you weren’t bad or stupid at my school you had to just get on with it, nobody really paid much attention – my career advice consisted of, ‘what do you want to do? Oh, a doctor? Right, better get on with it then.’ Full stop. You’re on your own.) and, more importantly, I made it out the other side of med school.

My friend said today that she thinks I’m ‘by far the most successful’ from our wee group of friends. But what does that mean?! How do you judge success? High school was no picnic for me, and neither was university. I had at least my fair share of struggles, dodgy moments and times when I thought I’d never get to the end of this darned education. But here I am.

I don’t think there’s any way that this is down to me. And I have no idea why I am so blessed to be doing what I love. It’s definitely not down to me. But I’m so grateful that I’ve been given the chance to serve God by doing something that I love.

I’m sure I won’t love it every minute of every day, there will be days when I am stressed and exhausted and when I wish I could go back to studenthood, but on those days, I’ll remember how blessed I am to be doing this job, and I’ll try to never take it for granted.