The Weight of Expectations

I started at the hospital in my clinical rotation in the middle of September and I was excited. That feeling of levity – like I finally landed where I belonged – came crashing down fast and left me reeling. A punishing sleep-travel-study-sleep schedule sucked my soul out of my body and I was not enjoying a single thing I was doing. There were varied reasons – COVID panic didn’t help. The day I finished that rotation I felt elated, and sad ….. my original plan was to go into clinical, and after the experiences I had I knew I could not.

I moved onto the food service rotation in January, and I’ll be done at the end of next week. It is marginally better (different, at least) but not somewhere I could see myself working. There is no room for creativity when you’re dealing with chefs who are convinced they are right about everything and would rather serve pot roast and talk politics than have a civil conversation with me about beans. Frustration abounds.

Due to COVID still hanging around (but dropping!), the next few rotations are going to be from home – WIC and MSU Extension (community) are slated for Feb through March, and I was really hoping to do these in person, given the community rotation is likely the one I would have enjoyed the most due to my work and education background. WIC I am dreading a bit, just because an RD I worked with fed my brain all her bad experiences, and I have minimal exposure to babies.

This brings me to the point = expectations. In all the Reddit boards and discussions I’ve read and been a part of in the last 6 months, I haven’t seen much honesty from people about the suckiness level of this part of the process. It is lonely. It feels like starting a new job, except you aren’t getting paid and bills keep coming in. I’m tired all the time. The travelling and early morning hours take their toll, as does the eating habits. I have minimal money to grocery shop and I stopped enjoying cooking, as well as doing most all my other hobbies. I have seasonal depression (have for many years) and right now it’s bad – made worse by the fact I don’t exercise. I got talked into getting a Masters degree, and as much as I’d like to be done in May I won’t be. In fact, I won’t even be done by this time next year. All the positive people in my life are like, “hey, this won’t last long.” They are right, of course – I’m sure retrospectively this will seem much shorter than it feels right now. I just think RD2Bs and RDs should be honest about this part. I can’t be the only one who looked forward to the internship and once in it, found it to be rather depressing. Now, by my own choice, it will be long too. The internship hours are done Memorial Day, but I still have summer and fall classwork, plus studying for the RD test (who knows how long that will take me) so realistically, I’m on this train for the next 12 mo +.

We only get a day at a time, right? Maybe I’ll just try to focus on the next one or two, instead of the next 342.