At two years qualified, I was no longer the baby vet in my practice; I suddenly found myself in a position of teaching more often than being taught myself.
This had happened to many of my friends already, but somehow my practice had not employed a new grad since me (as a recent rather than brand new grad) until now.
I’m not sure if it was the arrival of the new grads that triggered it, or if it was just coincidental timing, but I couldn’t help feeling restless.
Introductions over
At this point, you’re past the scary stuff; you’ve had the crash course in veterinary medicine that is your first few months in practice.
You’ve passed the period where every surgery was new – equally exciting and scary. You’re comfortable with routine procedures and common presentations of illnesses, and you’re now mentally equipped to deal with the uncommon ones, too.
Yes, you still learn new things, see cases you haven’t seen before and improve your management of them, but first opinion practice isn’t scary anymore – and because the rate at which you’re learning has dramatically slowed down, it suddenly feels mundane.
History repeating
I struggled to describe how I was feeling – I still liked my job and loved the people I worked with, but I wasn’t entirely happy and couldn’t figure out exactly why. Maybe it was because I had nothing to aim for.
It occurred to me that this is similar to how I felt when I started vet school – my whole life I’d studied, worked and volunteered to get into vet school, and when I actually started, I felt… deflated.
I got past that eventually, and maybe this is the cycle repeating itself – through vet school I worked towards graduating, became a vet, and continued to work hard to become confident at surgery and medicine – so, now what?
Stuck in neutral
For a while I couldn’t shake a feeling of unsettlement; I felt everyone around me was moving forward while I was treading water. I had friends from my year at university moving on to second or third jobs, taking up internships or residencies, travelling to work or volunteer abroad, thinking about certificates and locuming – and I was bumbling along in my comfortable mixed job.
It’s not that I didn’t like my job – I actually had a great balance of the work I wanted to do – I just had this niggling feeling I should be doing something… more.
Should I be thinking about further training? Has my brain gone completely stagnant after having been out of education for a couple of years? At what point do you stop becoming a better vet if you’re just doing the same thing day in, day out? I just couldn’t shake this feeling of inadequacy.
Searching for purpose
I trawled through the master’s courses and certificates I could take on alongside my current job; every so often inspired by a particular field, but then put off due to having missed the start date or looking at the costs involved.
Ultimately, I didn’t really have the drive or a passion for any of the subjects I looked into. I felt I was searching for something for the sake of feeling like I was progressing, rather than a genuine underlying interest in any of it.
So I stopping looking and – encouraged by friends who still enjoyed first opinion practice at this stage – carried on.
Grad(ual) realisation
It wasn’t an overnight change, but things did get better. I tried to focus on small victories at work, take stock of what I learned each week and found I actually really enjoyed teaching.
Supporting the new grads made me realise how far I had come in two years, and that I was more capable than I gave myself credit for. I took pride in seeing them progress, which made me feel less useless than I had done in a while.
I signed up for some CPD and booked a couple of weekends away, giving me something to look forward to.
Wave after wave
Gradually, I got to a place where I felt content again. It’s difficult to describe why, because nothing changed hugely. Maybe these things come in waves – and no doubt I will feel a bit lost again at various stages of my career.
However, once I realised it didn’t matter what my colleagues were doing, and that we all have differing career paths, I made peace with myself. I don’t necessarily need to run at top speed all the time to reach an as yet unknown destination – I just need to enjoy the journey, until I decide where I want to end up.
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