Former Doctors & Professionals - Leaving Career Identity

What happens when you've spent most of your adult life becoming something, and then discover you no longer know whether you want to be that thing? For more than four decades, I knew how to be a doctor. There was a role, a language, a credential, a community, an income, and an expectation of who I was supposed to be. Leaving medicine has been something else entirely. I've begun thinking about the experience of veterans returning home from war. I don't equate practicing medicine with combat. But I am interested in the disorientation that can happen when someone leaves a powerful institution whose skills, values, hierarchy, and identity have shaped much of their adult life. The public sees the uniform and honors what it represents. The person who wore it knows what actually happened while wearing it. That's where this essay goes. Into the pride and the doubt. The people helped and the people who may have been harmed. The strange experience of being admired for an identity you're trying to understand yourself. And the practical question of what happens when skills accumulated over a lifetime don't fit neatly into whatever comes next. I thought I was leaving psychiatry. I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm coming home from it. And there doesn't appear to be a manual for that. From Doctor to Civilian is about what happens when the white coat comes off, the title no longer answers the question, and the person underneath has to figure out who he is now. Maybe doctors aren't the only ones who know this experience. If you've ever left a profession, marriage, military career, company, ministry, identity, or way of life that once told you who you were, I'd especially like to hear from you. What helped you come home? Maybe doctors aren't the only ones who know this experience. If you've ever left a profession, marriage, military career, company, ministry, identity, or way of life that once told you who you were, I'd especially like to hear from you. What helped you come home?