I feel stuck
Hello everyone, I'm 26 and I've been into a deep existensial crisis for like two years. I've always been a smart, quick-learning girl, curious about many different things, good at school and sports. I've never been afraid of challenging myself into something hard, always setting very high standards on myself and feeling good about being able to reach them. So after high school I decided to study medicine. I wanted to be a point of reference to people, to be able to actually help them, and I wasn't afraid of the difficulty of that path. But during these years of university I've lost all my confidence, my passion and my will to learn new things. I've been taught to study lists of things by heart and barely nothing else. I've graduated, but I feel like I know nothing about my future job. Also, I haven't been able to choose a specialty, which is making me think I don't even like this job; in fact, I gave up so many things I liked to do to study medicine that I feel like this career is sucking my life out of me. I don't have a goal anymore, I don't know where I'm going, I've probably made it all wrong and I can't go back. I wanted to travel, and now I'm stuck here, studying for a very competitive test for residency I'm not even sure I want to take. I feel like I could have been really good at anything else, but this. And now I'm just wasting my time, letting days go by doing nothing, because nothing really gives me any satisfaction. I'm also having troubles with my boyfriend, I thought I was in love with him but now I feel like we are so different that I will always live in a compromise to be with him, as he doesn't seem to be able to change his patterns for me. I don't now what to do and who I want to be, and this never happened to me. The only thing I'd want is to go away from here, alone.
Has anyone felt like this before? What can I do to get out of this?
Hi @Drally. It sounds like you've been working very hard for a very long time. Asking a lot of yourself, setting the bar very high. I'm wondering if you are maybe experiencing something like burn-out. What do you think? Does it sound possible? Maybe you've had a lot of doing in your life and not a lot of just BEING. I also wonder if this could be a good time for you to take a step back and ask yourself what is really important to you. Not what is important to others or what others think should be important to you, but what is really important to YOU. In every situation we land in in life, we can ask ourselves what our values are, what is important to us and use that information to move forward. I hope you will find some direction and peace. Please feel free to tell us how you are doing and how things are developing.