Chapter 110

Entry taken from OSCE saga part 3:

Have you ever hated someone? Not disliked or frustrated. But truly hated. I’m not talking about your “salty” moments when your friend beats you in a video game or when your friend loses something of yours that he or she borrowed. I mean truly, truly hate. With every fiber of your being. What do you do in that situation? Well. The healthiest option would be to simply let it go. But I couldn’t do that. Not with [MPH]. Something about [MPH] just really bothered me after the entire ordeal with the appeal process. 

I am currenting sitting in the guest room of my mom’s house. All of the lights are turned off. I’m trying to decide on what to do. The appeal process is now done and the group and myself are now just left with nothing but all the time in the world to think about it. The next rewrite was also just announced and guess what? It IS going to be 6 months away. What the hell am I supposed to do for 6 months? 6 months more of limbo. Just to think about nothing except how at the lowest of my lows, MPH came in and worked our group up for a commission? Why why why? I now know how desperate I’ve been and I now understand how vulnerable I’ve made myself in the last few weeks. 

MPH sold me the light at the end of the tunnel. On some level I knew it was a false hope but still. That light gave me hope. MPH told us how professional the process would be and how streamlined the entire ordeal was. He bragged about how standardized it was and told us it would make us whole. I am way more angry that he sold us a dream that he knew to be false then took it away than I am that the $350 price tag. 

What is worse is that after speaking with [fellow classmate], I found out that she had been speaking with MPH about a “rescore” option. This was brought up during our zoom meeting but most of us brushed it aside. I mainly focused on the appeal option since I had an incident report form submitted during the exam. [fellow classmate] did not. Because of this she considered the rescore option much more in depth. 

MPH told her that the rescore option was another $350 option where he would personally go to the examination and recheck all the criterias for the exam and tally up for us how many points we were shy of in each area. If there was an arithmetic error at any point, he would correct it. If there wasn’t, he would at least tell us how many points we failed by. This is something that was not normally offered to classes but due to the outstanding circumstances of COVID, it would be exclusively offered to our group. This sounded good to [fellow classmate]. The “exclusive” term in itself kind of implied that there were some extra considerations that may be given as well. In the end, she did opt to pay for both the “rescore” option as well as the appeal because of this. Well guess what? Both were rejected.

Furthermore, it turns out that [MPH] telling her how many points she was shy of passing was also a lie. When she brought this up he said that he simply misspoke, he can’t disclose anything about the examination to her at all. Thinking back, this was just another cash grab. MPH just wanted to make an extra $350. When she got the results back, once again, [MPH]’s name was the only one there and with the appeal and rescore rejection letters. If you think a bit further into it, since the results of the test are completely confidential, [MPH] could have also just said he did take a look when he didn’t. In either case, no one would ever know. 

[fellow classmate] is now out $700 at the height of COVID. I can’t imagine how that feels especially when we’d need to pay $3,000 for the next OSCEs in a few months as well. These fees add up. [MPH] took us for a ride. He sold [fellow classmate] hope when she was desperate just like everyone else but went even a step further with this whole “rescore” nonsense.

How can someone take advantage of someone else at their lowest point? What the hell is wrong with [MPH]? He was maliciously evil. Furthermore, how the f*ck did someone like him, with no background in science, become the authority figure on the licensing exam of optometrists? How did that happen? Is our field’s bureaucratic side so broken that parasites like [MPH] can hold power over us? 

I hated this man. He played in our group when we were at our lowest. In my mind, he had fully scammed us and took advantage of our vulnerability. It’s strange to feel this level of hate. Unlike anxiety, where my emotions drove a fear that forced me off my chair, hate skipped the middle man and made me want to get up. Hate comes with a lot of energy. So much so that I found myself sometimes with too much energy from hatred that I can’t sleep nor want to sleep.

 I think hate occasionally leads to mania. Where you become super fixated on something that your obsession with spewing venom from your words takes over you and you just vent and vent [wording is a little weird here but that was what the original journal said]. Did I have this hatred before for anything? Did my relationship with mom or dad ever get to this level of toxicity? I don’t even remember anymore. 

ENTRY OVER

As you can tell, I was pretty angry with MPH. One important factor to also consider at this point was that during lockdown with nothing to do, it was hard not to just think about MPH. I mean, this was the only thing that was going on in my life at the moment. 

Anger, just like with anxiety, has the ability to hijack your thoughts. But worse still is that it also hijacks your energy. With anxiety, I couldn’t do my hobbies while dealing with it because anxiety just forces you to think about that one particular thing. With anger, yeah, there was a little bit of that going on but in truth, even if I could pull away from it, I don’t think I would have had the mental energy to do my hobbies. This is because anger uses energy. It doesn’t scare you into doing things, it makes you want to do things. It demands you exert energy and burn through your reserves to exert negativity. If you let it run its course, by the end you often find yourself exhausted. Is this better than sitting on your butt doing nothing feeling sorry for yourself? Hard to say. 

A day after the results of the appeals came through, I wrote a good 20 pages of journaling. While this productivity seems nice at first, unfortunately, looking through the venting I did revealed that most of it was just trains of thoughts that never went anywhere. Every now and then though, I would write a few sentences here and there about MPH. There were some good points I made but unfortunately, they didn’t have that much direction. As a matter of fact, the entry you read at the beginning of the chapter was the result of a good 4 rewrites because everytime I talked about MPH, it was hard to be concise about my thoughts. 

This puts my relationship with anger at a weird position. On one hand, it drained all my energy. But on the other hand, it allowed me to at least want to get up in the morning. Unlike anxiety where the world and the future just felt so uncertain that I couldn’t really do anything but feel bad, anger made it so that I was hyper fixated on something and wanted to do literally everything though I was powerless to do anything. With both anxiety and anger though, I couldn’t look away from the problem and distract myself with hobbies or anything. So I still felt like I wasn’t really in control of my mind. But with that said, anger seemed like it could be easier channeled. To that end, I feel like anger is at least an easier thing to deal with than anxiety.

Because it had such a strong focus on energy, it had a strong tanglement with energy usage. To that end, I realized really quickly that anger would be used for productivity. While I couldn’t direct the energy from anger towards something actually useful like doing hobbies (yet), I could channel it into exercise. That’s right, you can exploit the energy anger wants to use by going to the gym. 

Now, I am not stating for a fact that this is the case in general. In fact, anger would become a much harder beast to tame in the future. When faced with a stronger form of anger, I think that it is very arguably worse than anxiety because anger pushes for action. That’s dangerous when mishandled. However, for this current episode of rage that stirred from MPH, I was able to control the emotions and steer it in an at-least-not-completely-wasted direction. I think the other thing to consider was also that this entire fiasco, while kind of discouraging, wasn’t the end of the world. You get 3 tries for the Canadian board exams and sure, it costs money, but our group had only been on try #1. We had more opportunities at hand. 

I’m not sure if it was all the exercise or if after anger falls through you just get this sense of calm, but after trying to channel anger into just going to the gym, I was starting to feel much better. At the gym, I mostly jogged and did some light weights. There was a dance floor at my local gym but in all honesty, I couldn’t really bring myself to dance yet. It felt too much like a distraction from my current situation. How was dancing different from weights and jogging? It was tiring but didn’t require any cognitive input other than “just push”. I think it was around 3 days after the appeals fell through, that I felt the anger run its course.

Actually, I don’t think that’s the best way to describe it. Let’s not call it running its course. Let’s say it became more tame. Think about it more like a fire that can now be used for cooking food rather than a wild flame that’s trying to burn your house down. What I mean to say with this is that there is one arguable part of anger that’s way worse than anxiety. It never goes away. It sort of just lingers in the background, building up a little bit every time. 

If you’ve read my story up until now, you would know that I had been through the ringer before with anger-inducing things. I’ve had lots of things to be angry about and the argument can be made that my cynicism likely evolved from this build up of anger. But here’s the thing, I never really thought that much about anger as a demon of sorts until MPH. 

It seemed like just a natural emotion. Anxiety was a demon because I felt a strong grasp on my consciousness from it. Anger never did that in the past. But then, after MPH, I felt the pull from anger. My mind was unable to think about anything else other than the thing that’s causing anger. I knew it then that this could be an issue in the future. If anger is something that builds up but never goes away. It has the potential to grow. 

While this thought was a bit profound for me when I first thought of it, I did happen on the thought after the anger calmed down and I was in need of moving on. Profound or not, I needed to keep on swimming. Furthermore, I wasn’t really sure how to handle this fact even if I had the time. Regardless of my thoughts on the topic, I had to leave the mental dive and focus on the present. Speaking of which, what was going on at the present again? Oh right, I was still a failure. 

I was no stranger to failure at this point. I knew the process and knew it well. The introduction of anger was new but the process sort of still played out all the same. You fail. You feel like crap and lose your mind for a bit. Then you get over it. I mentioned in the past that what doesn’t kill you doesn’t necessarily make you stronger and while I still stand by that, I do see how that saying can have some validity through a different interpretation. I say that because this time, after the appeal was done and I had accepted the failure, I got over it in about 3 days. In fact, I was so surprisingly okay with everything that I pondered whether this was what people would call resilience. Maybe the things that don’t kill you make you more capable of standing back up. Maybe the spoils of war from winning an internal struggle is that the next time it comes around, you are able to pull yourself up better. 

I felt better after thinking about the situation that way. However…Then I thought about it a bit further and came up with another explanation. Failure or not, have I just become complacent? Maybe this wasn’t resilience. Maybe I had just lowered the standard on myself after being beaten down so many times. This interpretation made slightly too much sense. Even if you took this recent failure out of the equation, I still feel like I haven’t been trying my best for a while. I haven’t pushed myself ever since 2nd year of optometry, if I’m honest. On some level, it felt like I had been asleep at the wheel. 

On the night of the 3rd day post-appeals, I got lost in the thought that maybe I had been slacking off too much. What happened to the version of me who strived for excellence at everything. Where was the guy who wanted to win the Kiwanis cello competition so much he practiced 6 hours of cello every day? What happened to the guy who crammed all nighter after all nighter just for a few extra percentages in his GPA to get into optometry school? What happened to me? 

Could it be that all of my soul searching that I did was just me looking for excuses as to why I’m not looking for excellence anymore? Was it all to be okay with just being an average person with no ambition? This was a spiral but one that I fortunately got over quickly with a simple rhetorical question. It really doesn’t matter does it? Complacent or not, it’s all in the past. If I’m doubting even the soul search I did to find inner peace, maybe the answer isn’t more searching. Maybe the answer is to act. 

The best way to overcome past mistakes is to do something about it. Not only is doing something a chance to prove yourself but in choosing to do something, it forces you to think about the future. This is kind of relevant no matter when and where you are thinking about this. You have to look ahead. With this in mind, it’s easy to think about what I needed to do. 

I needed to wake up. I needed to get my edge back.