Saying No

Teach more? Full-time academics? More emergency medicine work? Free clinic work? This week I said no to all of it.

When I was a teenager I perpetually went through boom and bust cycles of activity, where I would overextend myself for weeks or months at a time and then abruptly become an unreliable hermit for a while once my energy bottomed out. I always felt guilty about that. Other people seemed able to sustain one pace without suddenly giving out here and there. So once I got a bit older I became a committed believer in the power of 'no' to change your life. I started saying no to things all the time. I'm not going to do that. I won't be attending that thing. I will not be able to help you with that. No. No. No. And my life got a lot better.

Then residency happened. Residency is essentially one giant YES. You have one option to say no, and that is at the very beginning. If you say yes to residency, you have inherently said yes to everything in residency.* I'm not proud of how I handled that overall, but I am grateful that God brought me through it. I think.

I'm in an interesting stage right now where I have too many wonderful opportunities. Talk about job security - I could honestly work as much as I wanted and have as many jobs as I wanted, all of them good positions. This is new territory and it brings up old bad habits. For me, it's a real struggle to look at all of the ways that I could be helping people and growing and contributing and collaborating - and to have to say no to so many of them. I have to remind myself that I already have two jobs where I work more than full time and am climbing more than one challenging learning curve. It's enough. Often it's more than enough and I wish I could dial back even more than I already have. But there's so much more that can be done. There's so much more to do.

While I don't have a solution, it's a good problem to have. Can I say for certain that I'm glad that I didn't quit residency? No, I can't. But maybe one day.

*Don't get me wrong, there's always something optional enough that you can get away with saying no. I said no to everything I could. It just wasn't enough.