I just finished season 1 of Sex/life on Netflix. While I am not sure I can get entirely behind the acting and plot, the premise is familiar enough.
What is having it all? And to whom?
I had it all once. A blossoming career. Authority and recognition in my field. A husband good looking and emotionally distant enough to always keep me chasing. Two beautiful children and enough existential angst to fill a bell jar.
I was dying, drowning, alone and misunderstood.
I had never wanted this life, exactly.
I had wanted a big life. I think that meant the spotlight and fame in my youth. Instilled upon me in childhood as it was that status mattered and in turn it’s cousin power.
And yet I chose medicine or rather medicine was chosen for me.
I could get those needs met to a degree but I was never going to be completely seen in a profession that kept you as an authentic person completely unseen. Patients don’t really know their doctors. Not really. We are there to be distant, other, expert. Not ourselves. Not at all.
I had been taught like every woman that this was it. The pinacle of life and yet…Yet I wanted to keep climbing. But how? And to what?
We are told to leave the passionate desires of childhood and youth behind. And when we are finally all grown up and in turn despondent: we are told to find what we loved as a kid. Maybe if we weren’t so conditioned to leave it all behind we wouldn’t find ourselves somewhere in the plot of our lives asking: is this really me? Is this all there is? Is this what I am supposed to want because everybody else does? What if I want more? What then? And how do I get it?
