Even Special Little Bears Fail

Image courtesy of wit + delight

Gosh, now where do I start this story?  When I was in my second year at university, I found it so incredibly challenging, so difficult, that it was more often than not demoralizing.  I couldn’t stand the structure of the year: way too many students in a vast class with little TA support.  I was drowning in a sea of hopeful doctors, each of us dropping our dreams one by one as the microphages and pipetting mocked us more and more from textbooks and labs.  It was all too much.  So my dreams of being a doctor, those dreams I dreamed while hooked up to machines, were very rapidly whisked out from under me. 

Of course, there is a rebuttal to this story: everyone went through what I did.  Some of us persevered (even I got 88% on an Organic Chemistry midterm!), while the rest of us just fell by the wayside.  Some people rose to the occasion and simply studied harder, but I, having found that failure was a very real possibility for me, was catapulted into a state of depressed, can’t-even-bear-to-study shock.  Since when was I just another brick in the wall?  Wasn’t I the special little bear my mother had promised I was?  Wasn’t I the smartest, wittiest, most deserving second-year university student?  Turns out getting a reality check is painful, necessary, and demobilizing.  As a matter of fact, I’m only just getting over it now.

I got into the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine after a gruelling application and interview process (and by some small miracle, as we’ll see later might just be a giant horseshoe).  It meant a lot to me at the time that I was going to be a part of Canada’s health revolution.  Turns out, I wasn’t.  Though my father put himself on the line both emotionally and financially to support me, I decided at the last minute to bow out.  I couldn’t bear the thought of people coming to me as a last-ditch effort to somehow rid them of their systemic ailments, caused by years of neglect and abuse.  How could I possibly be expected to help anyone who was first going to try every single solution before coming to the one true healer?  There I go again…the special little bear, rearing her ugly head.  I decided that being over $200,000 in debt with very little to call my own save the potential debt from buying an existing naturopathic practice was a little more than my tender 22-year old self could handle, and I bowed out.  Again.

There I was, a very scared young woman, renting an apartment in the city I’d grown up in (but it was in a totally great neighbourhood [insert eye roll], which made me feel, at least temporarily, as though it was the best place ever), working at a totally dead-end job that was handed to me from university days, and thinking I had it all figured out (cue second eye roll).  Oh, and I was dating my ex.  How rich.