It was a concept intimately familiar to me long before anyone gave it a name. From my earliest days in college, I felt surrounded by people who packed their days with meetings, activities, sports practices or competitions; classes, study groups, and research; for whom every moment had been spoken for and each day didn’t so much end as spill over into the next. The standard was clear: to do any differently was to be lazy, unmotivated, and destined for failure.
During medical school, the feeling only intensified. Free time was a prize to vocally lust after but also a guilt-inciting purgatory to be avoided at all costs. After all, we could never learn all there was to know about medicine, so how could we ever stop trying?
When I read Anne-Marie Slaughter’s description of “time macho” — the idea that “somehow you’re better and tougher and stronger if you work harder and longer” — during my last year of school, it gave me a tangible practice toward which to direct my frustration and a paradigm away from which to direct my own behavior. Throughout my training, I tried to assign some priority to sleep and to the people and things outside of medicine that nourish my soul. And until recently I thought that I had done an adequate job of it, and of encouraging the same in my colleagues.
Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage your online reputation: A social media guide. Find out how.
No comments:
Post a Comment