Chapter 70

Excerpt taken from “misc rants”

I woke up from a nightmare and my entire body drenched in sweat. 

This can’t be healthy. 

I almost didn’t write at all but let’s be honest, how can I go back to sleep? In light of such a shock, it sometimes is impossible to use writing to do anything. You get the sense that everyone is against you or out to get you. Plain language becomes aggressive and simple facts are even antagonistic. At the moment, I’m thinking about how the email pissed me off. 

It was just stating facts but I had somehow deluded the facts into thinking the person on the other side of the screen was laughing at me. I was even thinking about writing an angry email back but luckily, calmer minds prevailed.

Okay, this was cheesy I know. Especially when all of this will probably go away without as much as anyone else knowing what event transpired but still. I don’t feel good about myself at the moment. 

Regardless, the entry had been made and I was not not very functional as you’ve seen. I can’t help it. Every time I close my eyes my mind wanders off to how 2% can be the difference between me getting a summer and not. 

Entry Over

Later on in my life, my therapist would tell me that during this period of time, I didn’t have depression, just a lot of anxiety. To which I responded, well yeah. No sh*t. She said it got kicked into hyperdrive at the news of the failure. Then she mentioned how the anxiety likely ran in my family. Once again I thought. No sh*t.

It’s weird. I didn’t think I was this kind of guy. The kind of person who couldn’t control my own mental state due to some form of trauma, self imposed or not. What’s worse was, this wasn’t even trauma to a lot of people. This was just an email by a sweet professor of mine telling me to redo a test I had very closely almost passed. But that’s just the thing wasn’t it? To me it was much more than just an email. 

To me, I’ve been handed a risky situation where I may be denied continuation of my career with my group of friends. To me, this was a clear confirmation that I was an imposter among a group of totally capable doctors. I have had my worst fears realized. The demons in my head were chanting “you’re not good enough”.

When you’re in this state, it’s not a fun time. This is why I alluded to the mental game at the end of the last chapter. While material-wise for the supplementary exam, I had finished preparing about 1 week after getting the email, I was mentally still afraid of doing the exam. There was simply just too much riding on it. How good is the material in your head if you can’t access it because there was too much stress? The mental game is no joke. 

I was very fortunate that before the supplementary exam, I had a prior commitment I needed to attend to. This was VOSH. It was a humanitarian mission trip where I would volunteer my optometric expertise to an impoverished area for about 2 weeks. While I almost canceled this commitment due to my needing to write a supplementary test about 2 weeks after it was done, I am very glad to have stuck with it.  

In the end, I did decide to go on the VOSH trip. I figured I had studied enough already when the trip would come around and any more cramming would only serve my anxiety and nothing else. Furthermore, I just needed to get out of my house. Since VOSH involved traveling to a somewhat remote part of the world, it served as an easy escape from all my troubles. The last factor to my deciding to do the VOSH trip despite the supplementary test looming over me was the fact that the plane tickets were also non-refundable. 

VOSH stood for Volunteer Optometric Services for Humanities and it was just as it sounds, a charity group for eye care professionals who organized humanitarian trips. Every optometry student would be offered a chance to do a VOSH trip every now and if they accepted, they would be sent to a poverty stricken area to offer eye care services. I thought this was a resume filler more than anything else but as it turns out, it would be much more than I asked for. 

My trip with VOSH was in Moldova, which was located in Eastern Europe. The mission consisted of a team of a dozen or so Optometry students from both the UW Optometry and the Optometry school in Montreal. While there, we did eye exams for about 10 days or so. For glasses needs, we gave them glasses that had been donated by various clinics in Canada. The prescriptions were never completely accurate since we couldn’t really make customized glasses, a fact that most citizens of the first world take for granted. 

For any health related matter that needed surgery, we would write a quick note for the locals to keep. This note would then be kept as a form of a medical record. The locals could then do one of two things. The first thing the locals could do was find a specialist somewhere and give the information to them in hopes that they would perform the necessary surgery. This was costly but if the locals could save enough, the note itself would help with the progress along significantly. The second thing the locals could do was just wait. While it was never confirmed, there was talk about a team of Opthalmologists who would do a similar trip in the future who could perform eye surgeries and fix what we couldn’t do with glasses. 

Now on a base level, this seemed quite nice. We were helping the population who could not get access to eye care and aid them in small ways to brighten up their life. We were providing better vision to those who were in need. It wasn’t all one sided however. In return for helping, our team got to mix up with the locals and experience life in a different culture. Some of the locals would even give us gifts such as cherries they’ve grown in their own gardens or homemade moonshine that tasted slightly too much like gasoline. It was a fun time. 

But for me, it was so much more than just those interactions. For me, this VOSH trip did two things. The first was what I had just described, a sense of what true optometry is. Unlike just numbers and figures in a book, optometry was a profession of healthcare. You had to care about other people. Instead of learning about stuff in a book, the trip reminded me that the final form of my chosen career goal wasn’t to pass a course, it was to help people. 

The second fact I learned during my trip? As it turns out. Most of the things we learned in class weren’t really readily available to be used in real life. That is to say, we had learned a lot about theory but not enough clinical expertise. When it came to the actual eye exams we were doing on the locals, I found myself to be the same as everyone else who came on the trip with me. I was just like everyone else. I haven’t been ousted and I wasn’t an imposter. The imposter syndrome was weakened. 

Indirectly, there was a third benefit to going on the trip. Aside from just testing my skills directly with my classmates, I had also gotten a whiff of my own standing and privileges. Hanging out with and blending in with another culture gives you a lot of perspective. I’m here complaining about passing a simple test I’ve already studied and done once for, while the locals I’m seeing in Moldova are worrying about getting their parents in to see us because they’ve been blind for years. In comparison to that, why should I worry so much about the things I’m going through? If they could go on about life even with standards of living worse than mine, why should I be so worried? 

In my mind, I felt the world more. It’s a mishmash of a bunch of cultures and sometimes, there’s no pattern. It may be just luck or random chance that I am where I am today and maybe, just maybe, in light of all of that. I should just be grateful for the things I have. Being grateful is a hard mentality to gain. I used to think about how grateful I was all the time but somewhere along the line, I lost that person. I was now a cynic. I wanted to get better. 

After volunteering, we got a lot of thank yous from the locals and then headed out. If you thought that the trip was over you’d be wrong. My classmates and I were going on a mini vacation for about a week. It was a victory lap of sorts. Though the eye exams on the locals were nice, it was tiring and this provided the best solution to the problem. During that time, I got to hang out even more with my classmates and our bonds really helped me kick the final bits of the imposter syndrome.

When I got back home, I was fully refreshed. Unfortunately, right after we landed in Canada, all the troubles persisted once again. I was ready now and didn’t think too much of it though. All in all, I was in more of a positive mindset. This came to be even when I got back to studying. Everything just felt lighter.

While it was impossible not to worry about the guilt that may come if I end up failing the supplementary test due to this trip, I was able to defend against the anxiety better. While I was initially afraid of even facing the exam, I was now ready.

It was time to retake the test.