When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a writer as well, on the side, but have always lacked the confidence (or connections) to try to publish. But I always knew I wanted to be a doctor. When I was in school, I got the chance to work in a neonatal intensive care unit, which is the unit where the newborns are treated-they're premature, born to mothers addicted to drugs or alcohol, or just very, very ill. And it was working there that I knew I found what I wanted to do. To work with the infants, so tiny, a perfect incarnation of a naked, beating heart. Sometimes, they couldn't even bear a human touch, their systems were too reactive.

I know the feeling.

But when I got ot university, I hit the biochemistry classes designed to weed out the worthy from the chemistry-worthless. The kind of class where you wake up with your face in the crease of the book and realize, with a horrifying sense of hopelessness and futility, that you didn't understand, the upcoming test will be failed, and that you will not be a doctor. The dream is over. I was weeded out. Now I would not be a doctor, I would not be there to cry tears of joy when an infant got to go home or to cry tears of sorrow when they didn't.

Now I work in telecom, and more and more, I wonder why. I am not going to change anyone's life by being here. Once my job was my very definition. I lived for it, I wouldn't accept anything as a limitation to my career. But when I look at the tattered signs of my life, I realize something very big and scarily overwhelming...I'm not very happy.

Sometimes I think about going back to school and becoming a nurse, joining the Peace Corp. Or to go back and take those biochem classes again, and this time not give up until I succeed. Because I have seen the life that awaits if I fail-I am living it.
In the end, I am not sure I will do anything, except wonder when the moment will come when my life can change. And if that moment comes, if I can seize it with both hands and not let life let me go again.

-H

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 10:12 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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