I had a really cute outfit today that I wanted to show you guys, but I became a sobbing mess at dinner today so whoops! Long story short, I told my dad about how I want to re-evaluate what I want to do with my life and am leaning towards getting my PhD first instead of the MD first.

I still would ideally like both, I’m just tentative right now about committing 1/8 of my life to med school in roughly a year, and that on the plus side the PhD would be free and is less time than med school. He got very mad and yelled at me, and due to the way I was raised I expect to get hit when people start yelling at me so I started crying in the restaurant. Anyway, my dad doesn’t respect PhDs in science at all and keeps insisting that it’s one of the worst careers you can ever get— so he’s pretty disappointed and hung up.

However, in the end he said that he’ll give me unconditional support, he just wanted to offer criticism to make sure I’m thinking about my decisions and not just doing them. The angry words and phrases like, “You’re driving a car backwards and putting your foot on the gas if you do that!” are supposedly meant to be conversation topics so that I may objectively discuss my life path with him with sufficient consideration.

Anyway, it’s all up in the air as far as I’m concerned— that’s why I’m so dead-set on taking some time off after I graduate to meditate on this deeply for at least a year. Both commitments are long-term ones, though honestly PhD is actually less of a terrifying commitment than MD by far. He’s actually really gungho about me traveling and doing other things for a while. He just thinks doing translational research for public health is the worst thing ever (which is what I’m considering the most right now).

I went to the doctor’s office today and they told me that they can’t prescribe me more medication until my doc is back from vacation. Right now I’m trying to give myself some daily challenges so I can feel accomplished from baby steps and not crushingly sad and awful. I’m still figuring out what to write about for the next part of my comic on depression when you’re a jolly person, so maybe this lapse in medication will serve as comic fodder. Trying to make the best of a bad thing!

Anyway, my dad is okay now— I think he was really shocked and the disappointment really got to him at first, but he calmed down eventually and seems really sorry for making me cry over this.