New Journey. Overdue update.

Long time no see.

I am winding down my first position as an attending physician, and as of my departure, I will have been in the position for just over a year. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that the way in which my employer wants me to practice and the way in which I'm comfortable practicing are not aligned. I have pretty strong mixed emotions about this whole situation. On the one hand, I was ready to settle down, grow roots, and be a part of a community for the rest of my life and career, and now I'm yet again moving on to something else. On the other hand, I am glad to be leaving an employment situation that is not to my liking and it's sort of exciting transitioning to something different. It gives me a sense that my life is going somewhere and I'm not just stuck in a rut. Additionally, I have learned a lot about the real world of being a physician and what my preferences are in practice. I still have unanswered questions about what I want to do long term, but I will soon be learning a lot about that.

My plan is to do locum tenens, which is basically travel doctoring. I will be filling open positions for 1-6 month stints around the country, potentially even around the world if I work at US military bases. Because it is standard for housing at the locations to be covered, I will be giving up my apartment and basically become a nomad. I'm going to keep an official address and a storage space in my home town, which will help me feel rooted somewhere, but I think I'm going to feel like a resident of everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. One of the reasons I'm doing this type of work is that it is highly flexible and I'm not locked into a contract for more than a few months at a time. I can pick and choose the positions that don't require seeing too many patients in a day so I don't have to feel pressured to churn through appointments too fast, which is my highest priority at this point.

With the flexibility, though, comes the fact that I'll soon be a nomadic 1099 contractor, so I'm figuring out how to finagle car insurance, driver's licensing, taxes, health insurance, retirement accounts, packing away most of the trappings of a modern household into storage since I can't feasibly move them with me, etc. Above, I alluded to the fact that I'm feeling stuck in a rut in my current life situation. This mindset is somewhat concerning, because there is still a large part of me that wants to settle down and grow roots, but if I start feeling stuck in a rut every time I try settling down, I'm going to run into serious contentment issues. Perhaps I just need to find the right setting to settle into; one of the things I'm hoping to gain from seeing so much of the country and so many practice settings and working with so many different people is a sense for what type of personal and professional life characteristics I want in the long term.

On that note, I'll sign off and wish you well until next time, which hopefully will not be another three years.