Every once in a while I take a look around and wonder what on earth I am doing where I am. Mainly it happens when I get an invitation in the mail to another friend's wedding or a birth announcement. And then, in my shock, I yell at the empty room, "We are too young to be getting married and having babies! WE ARE NOT READY!!" And then I think to myself, "Correction: I am not ready (but then CLEARLY neither is anyone else!)"
And then sometimes my head starts spinning at the amount of responsibility I'm entrusted with at work and I begin to feel an awkward sense of importance. Like today, I interviewed a candidate for the center director position who just resigned as a high school Spanish teacher. Hellooooo! I interviewed a high school teacher, who is in the same ranks with my former teachers, who if I ran into on the street today I would still address as Mr. Heup or Mrs. Baldikoski!
Not to worry, the sense of importance is never inflated because usually I am humbled by other moments. Like falling down the stairs as I dole out parenting advise, or making the parent of a child with severe allergy go through all the rig-a-marole of paperwork, legal documentation, and one-on-one training of epi-pen procedures with the WRONG teacher, etc.
It is nice to know, however, that I am not alone. I caught up with a friend this weekend who started medical school 6 weeks ago. Their first role play was doing patient interviews to gather preliminary information. The instructor went around the room to each student with a certain case and the student was to ask the right questions to gather all the necessary info. After all these vanilla cases (I have a sore throat, there's a floater in my eye, etc) he got to my friend. When she asked what brought him in today, he said, "It hurts when I go to the bathroom." And my sweet, ridiculously intelligent, aspiring-doctor friend burst out laughing. And as soon as she had stifled her giggles she said to herself, "I am too immature to be a doctor."
Which brings me to my conclusion--that it is not real afterall. We really are just pretending to be adults.
1 comment:
I know how you feel. I feel like that sometimes, too. I guess at some point there's a shift and you realize that you are a grown up. Maybe that's what the "mid-life crisis" is all about.
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