Burnout

“What is Life?”

I asked myself so many times in my life, and no matter how many times I think I found the answer, I’m back to ask…

What is life?

When I was 17 years old, covid19 happend, me before the laptop showing me a black screen divided to squares that is my new classroom, the squares were talking but it did not feel real enough to engage, like another youtube video.

My friends are nowhere to be found on the internet, everyone had their troubles and everyone suffered the worst during covid but it felt like they collectively decided to betray me and leave me alone.

Mastering the art of weaving pain into words, I’ve survived, but survival is not life, quarantine is not life, so I thought to myself: once this pass I’ll have the chance to live again.

18 years old, quarantine is over, and I’m back to school, reuniting with my friends, they were as bright as I can remember them to be, but me, something in me died forever, facing school was harder than I thought and collage enterance exams are approaching…

Once this pass I’ll have the chance to live.

19 years old, turns out I have one more race to have before getting to med school: prep year, I was not ready for this, but to fight is the only option.

Once this pass…

20 years old, first real year of med school, now I feel the life, a lot of friends and I’m doing the thing I wanted, what could happen so wrong?

Burn out, I got that so frequent, and so painfully…

Well I can’t explain really how our collage teaches medicine but basically we have one exam every month that include questions from every subject we take, so Anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, biochemistry, everything you can think of is crammed into one huge 80 MCQ Exam taken in a single day, IT IS SO MUCH DRAINING TO STUDY FOR, everytime i’m out of the exam hall i fear the next one, like a hamster cycle.

I thought that medicine is my life, the friends I made here too, everything is perfect except medicine itself, you never have enough time or enough energy to study for anything…

So I’m back to the question again, what is life? If its not in the school, nor outside it, not in medicine, will it be outside it? Sure no…

How can I feel alive again? I really despise routine but there is nothing much to do, I want to ask people how do they get over or heal burnout? How do they get alive again? Do they not? Then how to persist? I feel compeletly drowning in darkness, slowly this darkness is turning me against me, I feel a lot of guilt for not studying most of days, it hurts when people think they can rely on you when you can’t trust yourself.