letter to a future self

16th February 2016


dear me,

How are you? I hope this letter finds you in good health. I have no way of knowing when you'll read this. The future is a complete mystery to me. I do not know where I will end up in August or where I will be working or even if I will graduate medical school, or if I'll be in a different continent in 5 years time. The immediate future has never looked so uncertain. If I were to guess, I'd say my future plays out like this: I pass my final exams by the skin of my teeth and get accepted into a hospital either in Manchester or in the East Midlands. I then work there for two years and make new friends, start a new relationship that lasts 6 months, but we end it on good terms because it becomes clear to us that our lives are heading in different directions, but I still think about her and wonder how she's doing from time to time, wish her happy birthday on facebook and stuff.

Then things get worse for junior doctors, and Jeremy Hunt becomes prime minister of Britain and lobbies to start paying junior doctors in chocolate coins instead of real money, and the rest of the UK is like, 'yeah that sounds pretty reasonable'. So I travel to either Australia or Singapore or Thailand and start a new life there. I grow a beard. I take a year out to try and write a novel. I only manage to write about 50 pages, and then I give up and get back into medicine. I get involved with community outreach at the local church and get really motivated to go out and feed the poor and help the homeless. I try to do clinics and provide healthcare for the ones who need it the most and who can't afford it, but in the end it's financially not feasible and I abandon that pipe dream. As work becomes busier and I start to prepare for the competitive entry into ST3, I am forced to cut back on my community outreach activities. At this point I am seriously romantically interested in a colleague at work, an intelligent and ambitious woman who a few nurses and co-workers have privately referred to as 'cut-throat' and 'scheming', but I discover she has an unexpected soft side to her. I am also simultaneously attracted to a sweet and guileless, good-natured girl who volunteers often at church. I decide to pursue a relationship with the work colleague. This lasts for 2 years and then ends because she decides to move to the UK after securing a highly sought after training post that will advance her progression in the speciality of her choice. Also, she and I have never really seen eye to eye on why I insist on doing community work, and in one or two heated disagreements she has insinuated that I only do it to feel good about myself, to feed my own ego and get off on the delusion that I am more moral and altruistic and holy than everyone else. And I am not entirely sure she is wrong. The good-natured girl is now married. I shave off my beard and question my life decisions. I am now 35 years old.

And of course none of this will actually happen. When it comes to predicting the future I've discovered I have a 0% success rate. (4 years later, you receive an email from the work colleague saying she's in town for a medical conference and was wondering if you'd be free to meet up? smiley face. You agree and when you talk to her you find that she's like a completely different person. Softer. Kinder. She tells you that someone in her family was diagnosed two years ago with cancer and that her experience of being helpless and in need for once had given her a new perspective on life. She tells you she sees why charity mattered so much to you now, that you were right and she was wrong, and that she's sorry for saying those things. She didn't know any better. You tell her not to apologise, then she puts her hand on yours and you both share a moment together. Then she says she has to leave because her flight is tomorrow morning. Her boyfriend's name is Matt.) I wonder if you think this plot is hackney and boring. I'll admit it's certainly not the most original. I'll also admit it's kind of too neat and linear and is meandering and doesn't have any real point to it... like something out of a Judd Apatow movie. Or maybe the drama and conflicts are too cliche - does this sort of thing happen in real life? Or just in writers' imaginations. I have no idea.

I realise that in terms of 'real life' experience, I don't have very much. My experience of 'real life' and its ups and downs and tragedies and crises has been very limited so far, and far too limited to extrapolate from. I'm still not 100% confident in my ability to distinguish between 'reality' and mimesis. The man cheating on his wife. Do the TV shows get it from real life, or do people in real life get it from the TV shows? Which way round is it? I remember a couple of years ago my greatest worry was that I'd write something that the me in three years time would look back on and sneer at. Or worse, furrow his brow and say nothing at all. I think I haven't completely grown out of that yet.




It's been a while since I did this. Or maybe it hasn't. Maybe it just feels that way.

Maybe the most useful thing I can do is just describe the present, to remind you of things. Build a kind of time capsule. You probably know a lot more than me, you've probably (hopefully) grown and have learned things that I don't even know I don't know yet. and so I have very little to offer you really. But here goes.

You sit in your bear onsie typing this on an old ASUS laptop that has served you faithfully for the past 4 years, but annoyingly lags horrendously when you try to play games on it. You have forgotten when you bought the onsie (was it last year? or two years ago) but since then it has kept you warm throughout the winter months. Downstairs a rice cooker sits full of rice that you have to figure out how to use before it goes stale. In the fridge there's a ziplock bag with five or six chicken breasts that you don't know how to cook yet. You bought them like three days ago so you've got about 10 hours to use them before they go off. To your right on your desk sits the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine 8th Edition, and your iphone 4 rests on top of it. You used it to take a picture of a google search that said 'how to cook chicken karaage cooking with dog'. The time is 2:53am. You have 19 tabs open. 8 of them are youtube tabs. One leads to Business Insider. The headline reads: "Science says lasting relationships come down to 2 basic traits". You have not yet found out what these two basic traits are, but you decide they must be pretty important. But also you are wary of any headline that leads with, 'Science says...' As if science is some dude on the street and also some kind of perfect oracle.

There's a half finished packet of custard creams and ritter sport white chocolate from Lidl on your desk. You've already brushed your teeth but the promise of sugar is calling out to you and you're beginning to think you don't really mind brushing them again. Two days ago you read about a man whose last words quoted Jesus as saying, 'I was in prison and you visited me.' You now fiercely believe that the highest calling of any human being is to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, heal the sick and provide shelter to the homeless. To live a life in service of the needy and unwanted. To devote your life to those worse off than yourself. Everything else is secondary. Your final exams are in 3 days' time.