Launchpad: You Deserve a Life Outside of Your Career

Somewhere around the age of 4 or 5, surrounded by cows, horses, and scrawny barn cats on my grandfather's dairy farm, I made a decision that would define my life. I was going to become a veterinarian.

And I did. Which is wonderful. But also, as it turns out, a little complicated.

When you spend your entire childhood and young adulthood oriented toward a single goal, it becomes more than a career; it becomes the story you tell about yourself. So, when I finally arrived (degree in hand, licensed, employed, and actually doing the thing), it was almost natural to let it overtake everything else. I was a veterinarian. Full stop. That felt like enough of an identity to build a life around.

Becoming a mom eventually reshuffled my priorities in ways I didn't see coming; however, you don’t need a major life event to recognize you deserve a life outside of your career. That realization is available to you right now, wherever you are.

It's normal and healthy to move through phases of your career: periods where you are deeply invested, fired up, staying late because you’ve got the resources and you genuinely want to help the emergency that walked in 10 minutes before close; and periods where the job is just that—a job where you do good work, go home, and spend your mental energy somewhere else entirely. Both are legitimate, and neither makes you a bad veterinarian. After those times of rest, you usually naturally feel yourself becoming fired up and engaged once again.

The profession will tell you, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that veterinary medicine is a calling and should be treated as one. Maybe it was a calling for you, the way it was for me, but a calling is not the same as a requirement to sacrifice everything else. You are allowed to have hobbies that have nothing to do with animals. You are allowed to take a vacation and not think about your caseload. You are allowed to clock out in every sense of the word and come back the next day a little more whole for having done so.

My grandfather’s barn, along with all its 4-legged inhabitants, is gone, but our family still owns the land, and I go back there once in a while. Something about it still feels like the origin of who I am today, which is exactly why I've learned to protect the parts of my life that have nothing to do with veterinary medicine.