The Worst Combination
Last year, I decided that I no longer wanted to be a doctor in Indonesia. I want to move to a country that I don’t need to think too much about money when it comes to continuing my study, especially because I’m still a general practitioner, so I really want to become a specialist, which means I need to do my medical residency. Unfortunately, in Indonesia, being a resident means you need and have to have a lot of money because in Indonesia you need to enroll in a university and pay the tuition. Not only tuition, but you also need money for the living cost, additional courses, publishing articles, and other things you can’t really expect. Thus, I decided that I need to move from Indonesia.
After a whole 2 months of thinking, I decided to move to Spain because, to be a resident there, you need to take the MIR exam, which I think is a fair and objective exam. But on the other hand, it means that I need to learn a new language, and as a 29-year-old, learning a whole new language is not an easy thing to do. While still working as a full-time doctor in a hospital with 27 shifts a month, learning a new language and preparing for the MIR is really hard.
Get Ranitidindin’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I’ve been learning Spanish for 6 months now, and unfortunately my Spanish has not really improved. I really want to commit to learning Spanish every day, but my work schedule is not really helping because it’s almost impossible for me to learn Spanish while at work, but after work my energy is already at its lowest. Working 27 shifts a month + learning Spanish + living my life is taking a toll on my brain and my body. It feels like I’ve been running for 6 months non-stop.
All of those things are getting worse when my perfectionist side is taking over my brain. I started to think and see things that I lack and not the things that I’ve achieved so far. I started to overthink, stress, and doubt myself. I started to procrastinate on things, and the worst of it, I started to shut down. I’m exhausted, and I know that I can’t stop moving, but I really need to stop for a while. I just started to worry about the perfection of something that I haven’t even started.
So being an overthinker, a perfectionist, and a pessimist is the worst combination.
