2017 - The Year in Review

I love the end of the year.  Partly that's because I have time off (10 days this year!), and partly because I love to reflect back on the year that was. 

2017 has been a pretty major year in my life.  I started it in a long-term relationship with plans to buy a home and eventually get married, and I ended it single with cats.  But in a very good way.  I can't remember a recent time in my life when I felt as happy or as deeply satisfied with life as I do at the end of 2017.

Here's a brief recap of the major events of 2017:

The Breakup:  M and I went through a breakup in 2016 but very quickly reconciled.  In retrospect, reconciling was a really unwise thing to do, as we were even less happy in round two of our relationship than we had been in round one.  We loved each other a lot, but we couldn't actually live happily together, which is somewhat essential for a committed romantic relationship.  For me, I started seriously considering breaking up again about a year ago, and from December 2016 until September 2017 breaking up was rarely far from my mind.  It was a really unhappy way of living.

And then, it was over.  After months of thinking and agonizing and building up to the moment, I finally ended it, and I felt like I could breathe again.  All of the emotional energy I had been investing in a relationship that wasn't working was suddenly available for more interesting and life-giving things.  Like joining Twitter.

I have not regretted the breakup for a single moment.  It has been an adjustment, of course, but everything about it feels right.  People comment regularly that I look happy and that they are glad to have "old me" back, and it is true that I am happier than I have been in a long time.  I have time to spend with my friends, instead of my social life being mostly dictated by M*.  My apartment is tidy and back to the semi-minimalist state that I love.  My cats have regained their rightful place next to me on the couch.  All is as it should be.

Work:  At the beginning of 2017, work wasn't going well.  I was feeling so overwhelmed by it that I declared 2017 "The Year of Saying No" and resolved to turn down as much extra work as I possibly could.  I knew at the time that I couldn't sustain my level of work unhappiness in the long-term, so I committed to doing whatever I could to improve my job.

Over the past year, I have made some major changes.  One of the most important ones has been going to a performance coach, whom I shall call B**, and whom I promise to write about in more detail in a dedicated post.  B is trained as a clinical psychologist and used to work with high-performance athletes, and over the years he has transitioned to working with high-performance professionals such as physicians.  He and I have worked on improving my thought patterns using a sort of cognitive behavioural therapy "light", which has been hugely helpful for dealing with my anxiety around work.  He's also given me some very practical advice about things that I can do on a daily basis to enjoy work more.

I have also committed to taking vacation every three months.  I cannot overemphasize how life changing this has been.  Vacation time is the only time that I can completely let go of the stress of work, and it is essential to recharging my easily depleted batteries.  It also gives me time to stock up at Costco and to replenish my freezer food stores.  And when I return from vacation, I no longer feel the dread of knowing that the next one is a long way away.  At most, it's another three months.

Lastly, I have been saying no.  When I was stressed about having to give a Grand Rounds presentation, I said no to a week of call so that I would have time to work on it.  When I got my 2018 call schedule and saw that I was scheduled for two more weeks than usual, I found other people to take those two weeks.  When I was asked by the trainees to develop two new teaching modules during a very busy work time, I agreed to do one but not both.  I am valuing my time and my mental health more than I ever have, and I am protecting both of them by setting my own limits for what I'm willing to do.

Finances:  When M and I were still together, we were planning to buy a home, as our one bedroom apartment was too crowded for the two of us.  For over a year, I saved all of the money that I didn't spend or invest for a down payment.  After the breakup, I underwent a major change of heart, realizing that I wasn't going to be comfortable taking on a mortgage until my debt was gone.  Since then, debt repayment has been my financial priority.  You can see the change in my line of credit here:

Until September 2017, my debt was gradually trending downwards thanks to my minimum monthly payments.  But in both September and December, I put large chunks of my down payment towards the debt.  What was once over $200,000 of debt is now $64,000.  And I anticipate that I will be able to get rid of it all before the end of 2018.

So those are the big parts of 2017.  There is much more than I had thought about saying, but this post is already long, and if I were reading it I would have started skimming it a long time ago.  So I will save my other thoughts for future blog posts.

I'm looking forward to sharing more in 2018.

*Not to falsely imply that she was controlling in any way, as she wasn't.  She is simply an extrovert with much higher social needs than introverted me, so I never had energy for social activities beyond the ones that she arranged.

**I am very creative with names on the blog.  You're welcome.

The End of the Thirties

When I was a few months into dating my girlfriend, we celebrated her birthday together for the first time.  For me, birthdays have always a pretty understated affair, marked by a single special dinner and maybe a cake.  Not so for my girlfriend.  For her, birthdays are an event...or more accurately multiple events involving as many different activities and as many people as possible.  I was somewhat stunned that first year by the number of celebrations that a single person could have in honour of her birthday.

It took me a few years to realize that this was something that I could use to my advantage, but now that I'm three years into the relationship and a few days away from my fortieth birthday, I know to milk it for all it's worth.  I'm not having a single birthday this year; I'm having a birthday month.  Dinner with friends, dinner with both sides of the family, an Escape Room with other friends*, and birthday tapas with the girlfriend.  I will be celebrated!

And, inevitably, I will be a bit melancholy.  Because there is something about turning forty that feels...old.  Forty marks the end of the decade in which I went through medical school, residency, and fellowship.  It marks the end of the decade in which my father died.  It appears to mark the end of my single life and of dating new people**.  Realistically, it probably marks the end of any chance that I will have a biological child.  While I am hopeful for good things in the upcoming decade, I can't help but feel a bit wistful for the things being left in my thirties.

How does one let go of so many things that made them who they are?

*Have you ever done an Escape Room?  Puzzles and friendly competition all in one?  Yes!  Love them.

**If my girlfriend reads this, which she only seems to do when I write something she would find remotely bothersome, I can just hear her saying "Appears to?  What does 'appears to' mean???"

Why I Continue to Live the Frugal(ish) Life

One of the best people I met during my fellowship training was our Educational Coordinator, S*.  S is slightly older than I am** and married later in life, so she could empathize with me during both the single-career-woman-looking-for-love and the single-career-woman-falling-in-love stages of my training.  She was also a huge advocate for me and the other fellow, which was invaluable in dealing with a system that was often indifferent and occasionally blatantly hostile to its trainees.  When I finally finished my training, one of the few things that made me sad was no longer working with her on an almost daily basis.  (Everything else was bliss.)

While I liked S from the very beginning, I really bonded with her after I abandoned my spendy ways and started living more frugally.  She would stop at my desk to chat fairly regularly, and one day we got talking about money after she caught me binge reading the great Mr. Money Mustache.  It turned out that she had learned to be frugal while living as a single person, and she'd carried that approach into married life, such that she and her husband currently live off a single income and bank the second one for retirement.  Over the remaining months of my fellowship, we talked regularly about the freedom that comes from living well below your means and about all the sources of happiness that don't require money.  In a financial sense, she and I clicked.

Which is why I was surprised the other day when I ran into her in the hallway, and she asked me "Are you getting used to living like an attending now?"  Her assumption, like everyone else's, was that I had abandoned frugal living as soon as my first fee-for-service patient entered my clinic.  In reality, for anyone who is curious, I'm living on almost exactly the same budget as I did during fellowship***, and every additional dollar I earn is either getting saved or applied to my debt.  Which makes many people (my accountant, my financial advisor, my spendthrift physician friends) ask me "Why?"  They point out, quite legitimately, that I could afford to be more liberal with my spending and to buy a house and a car that doesn't have a giant chunk out of its rear end.  They simply don't get why I keep living like a fellow despite my attending's salary.

For me, the answer is easy:  choice.  As long as I am in debt, as long as I am spending most or all of the money that I earn, then I have to keep working long hours as a physician.  If I buy the big house and the fancy car, then I'm always compelled to earn a high income to pay for them.  Which isn't so bad now, when I'm fresh from training and still somewhat keen, but who knows how I'll feel in 10 or 20 years.  Maybe I'll want to stop working full time and take three-day weekends every week.  Maybe I'll be sick of my subspecialty and want to retrain in another field.  Maybe I'll burn out altogether and want to move to the West Coast to smoke pot.  Who knows?  All that I know is that saving money now, and living on less, means that I can practice medicine because I choose to, not because I have to. 

Even in the short-term, frugality makes life better.  I can work at an inner city clinic, where I earn slightly less ridiculous amounts of money than I would at a tertiary care centre, because I don't have to maximize my salary at the expense of my happiness.  I can say no to extra weekends of call, even though I usually don't****.  I can sleep better at night knowing that I'm within a few months (maybe as little as two?) of having a legitimately positive net worth, even without counting my car.  All of this is way better than a $30 bottle of wine or a $200 dinner out. 

And let's be honest:  I'm really just pretending to be frugal.  I'm not living a Frugalwoods life of 10-cent rice and bean lunches over here.  I'm living off of more than the average family in my city.  I'm traveling to the Middle East in May, and I'm going out for Korean food tonight, and I'm buying weekend passes to our local music festival instead of volunteering.  As my accountant said recently, I'm living a "relatively modest" life.  It's only in comparison to the crazy excesses of many doctors that my life is in any way frugal.  And for that, I'm very lucky. 

*I'm so creative with the names.  You're welcome.

**5 years?  10?  15?  I'm terrible at guessing ages.

***I added $200 per month to my travel budget, because we love to travel and have some big trips planned this year, and I threw a bit of money at my budget to make up for the Great November Debacle so that I wouldn't have to spend a year recovering.

****That will happen once I hit a positive net worth.

2015 - Looking Back

The gifts have been opened, the horrible Christmas cold has been survived, and the girlfriend and I are spending the last few days of holidays maximizing our laziness.  Our wardrobes alternate between sleep clothes and sweatpants, meals consist of assorted cheeses and chocolates from the dwindling supply of leftovers, and our main activity is binge watching Netflix on our laptops (The Good Wife for her; The Walking Dead for me).  If I didn't have to carry the pager and periodically put on grown up clothes to go to the hospital, it would be perfect.

Although it seems cliche, I thought I'd take this opportunity to reflect on the year that has passed.  While some parts of it have been hard, I would say that it's overall been a good one.

Work:  Without question, this has been the biggest event of the year.  After 16 years of post-secondary training, I finally completed all of my studies in June.  And then I started as an attending in August!  By the time my fellowship ended, I was feeling very "done" with being a trainee and with having to do what other people tell me to.  Now as an attending, I sometimes wish that someone else would tell me what to do.  I struggle daily with the stress of making my own decisions and being responsible for the outcomes of my patients.  I worry that I don't know enough - that I'm not enough - to be a good doctor for them.  And it sucks.

On the upside, though, I'm slowly learning to be the type of doctor that I want to be.  I'm taking time with my patients to get to know them and to earn their trust.  I'm learning to work with very diverse staff members, the vast majority of whom I enjoy and make my life easier.  And I'm developing more of the clinical experience and judgment that make someone a really good doctor.  So some of it is really good.

Also, I managed to complete the monstrous curriculum redevelopment project with more than 24 hours to spare before the deadline.  And I think I did a pretty good job.  So yay for me.

Finances:  2015 has mostly been a year of budgeting.  For the first half of the year, I was very careful with my money in order to save for an out-of-town elective* and for seven weeks of vacation after fellowship.  While the tight budget was stressful at times, there were some unexpected benefits to having to find ways to be happy without spending money.  On my vacation, for example, I saved money by volunteering at our local music and theatre festivals, and I created a lot of positive memories from the volunteering itself.

Once I started working, I did a very smart thing and kept up with the budget (although with some loosening given that I don't have major expenses for which to save).  I also went to my trusted financial advisor and said "Here is all the extra money I will be making.  Save it for me."  By not inflating my lifestyle along with my income, I've been able to make even more financial headway than I had hoped.  I'm ending the year approximately $40,000-$45,000 better off than I started it, and I'm hoping to be back to a positive net worth within a year of starting work.  Only $42,000 to go**.

(Full disclosure:  I did completely lose my financial shit in November, and it took me the entire month of December to recover.  I'm not perfect.  It was a good life lesson, and one that I may write about here if I make the time for it.)

Romance:  2015 is the first full calendar year that the girlfriend and I have spent together.  For both of us, it was a year of transitioning from the initial "Yay!  I'm in love!  Everything is wonderful!" phase into the "Hmmmm....I'm actually dating a real, imperfect human being" phase.  Some of it has been challenging, and there have been more discussions about the appropriate loading of the dishwasher than I thought two people could have in one year, but most of it has been wonderful.

After spending almost 15 years of my adult life as a single person, it is simultaneously incredible and strange to be sharing my life with someone.  I love having someone to debrief with at the end of the day and to wake up with on weekends.  (On weekdays, waking up is horrible, and it is made worse by the fact that my girlfriend starts work much later than I do.)  I love always having a date for weddings, particularly one who is less excited about dressing up than I am.  I find it strange that someone else gets an opinion about the type of soap that I buy and whether the cats sleep with me in the bed.  I am sometimes an asshole about sharing the couch.  (The spot in the corner by the lamp is always mine.)  It is imperfect, but it is also lovely, and I think I'm going to keep her.

Relationships:  My seven-week-long vacation was a great opportunity to reconnect with people in my life.  I spent time with my Mom, my grandmother who lives outside of the city, my nieces, and multiple friends whose lives are even busier than my own.  It was a great reminder of how many good people I have in my life and of how important they are to me.

Then work started and...well...time with other people is always the first thing to go.  This is something to work on.

Hobbies:  2015 was the year of the library.  I always have a stack of library books waiting to be read, as well as a running list on the library website of books to order when I need more.  I seem to mostly be reading non-fiction, with an emphasis on medical memoirs and strategies for life improvement (e.g. Gretchen Rubin), but there has been some good fiction thrown in there.  I'm thankful that my girlfriend reintroduced me to the library, as it has led me to read many books that I never would have been willing to spend money on and therefore would not have otherwise read.

The real positive to reading more is that I have been watching far less television than I used to.  While I still haven't given up cable, and I probably won't unless Top Chef gets cancelled, I have probably cut my television watching time in half.  (Not counting the 16 episodes of The Walking Dead that I have watched in the past week.)

Travel:  Due to the budget, 2015 has involved much less travel than other years.  I spent a month away from home on elective in February, and at the end of the month the girlfriend and I had a few days in the Rocky Mountains for vacation.  We similarly had a few days of vacation in San Francisco following a conference in November.  But that was it.  Even my seven weeks of holidays were spent entirely in my home city, without even a trip to the country to photograph grain elevators.  While I'm happy to have saved the money, I am feeling a bit of wanderlust.

Health:  There is a smear of cheese on my sweatshirt.  This pretty much sums up my commitment to health this year.  Although I did take up biking in the summer!  That counts for something, right?

That's it!  How was your 2015?

*In the end, I was reimbursed all of my expenses for my out-of-town elective, which was a huge boost to my budget.  Yay!

**I still have approximately $165,000 of debt though.  Ugh.  It'll be close to a decade before that beast is slain.