When I turned 30, I was on top of the world. I just finished medical residency, the finale of 12 years of training, put on my big girl white coat and started doctoring, moved to the gorgeous Pacific Northwest with my husband J and two dogs, bought a foreclosure which we were itching to put our stamp on, and we were actually having success in making new friends with similar interests (notoriously difficult to do after age 30).
I decided my victory lap would be 3 x 10k races. I joined a run club, searched Pinterest for days looking for the best training schedule, bought way too many running clothes because if I wasn’t going to run fast, I might as well be shiny and reflective AF, and finally, I ran my last 10k ugly Christmas sweater race on Dec 3.
And just like that, 30 was gone.
I had achieved everything I ever wanted to achieve by the ripe old age of 30.
Career wise, I had made it – 2 board certifications by cramming 6 years of training into 4, private practice with my very own patients, never having to run treatment plans by anyone else for their stamp of approval – this was what I had worked toward for TWELVE LONG YEARS.
In terms of personal goals, I had finally convinced J it was time to leave Michigan and its shitty 100 inches of snow accumulation behind in order to live the PNW hipster dream with hiking, food and craft beer galore. I had a great marriage to the guy who had been with me through premed, med school and residency over the last 11 years.
House wise, we were making slooooooooow but steady progress, which was really more like laziness end capped by a flurry of ineffective activity, then more laziness again, but that’s a post for another day.
All I had left were my student loans. All $250,000 of them at 6.55% interest, compounding daily.
Was this the only goal I had left? To pay that off? Now, one would argue (especially J’s and my parents) at this point in life, you start a family.
Just the very thought was like a pair of hands slowly strangling the air out of my windpipe. There were so many things I still wanted to do without the weight of a small child, diaper bag and double wide stroller, and besides, kids are expensive!
Who could think of dedicating upwards of $15,000-20,000 per child per year when I was already drowning in so much debt? I couldn’t even really say what it was I wanted to do before I had kids, maybe some nameless concept of travel or on a day to day scale even having a drink or three without fearing the consequences of damaging my unborn child’s brain forever. (Now, this is not meant to be commentary on other people’s decisions to have kids – to each their own! It just was not something I wanted at this point, not yet or maybe even not ever.)
Nothing prepared me for this.
Don’t life crises stem from realizing you HAVEN’T done the things you thought you would by the time you got to *insert age* years old?
What do you do when you’ve done all the things on the to do list?
It seemed so simple – you just add to the to do list. Except, with every addition and eventual crossing off the list, I didn’t gain any more contentment or happiness.
It is said with each failure comes a lesson, so here it is: