Diane

Goodbye This is my last post journaling in this forum. I decided to continue journaling only on paper. Thank you @Leo Gura for creating this beautiful space and thank you to all the people who interacted with me. All the best!! :* :* :* Diane

Too many voices? I feel like I've always made my decisions depend from others or what I thought others wanted or expected from me. My family, school, friends, boyfriends, the personal growth guru of the moment internet... Maybe it's time to start listening to myself? A radical action like going inside and listening to myself instead of putting on the XYZ audiobook/video/MasterClass that could help me solve my XYZ problem. Every day is a good day to start again so why not today? It's D time!! ?? I want to re-own my life and be able to do the things that I love (CrossFit, Running, studying, dancing and taking good care of myself and my patients).

Brain dump They say it helps so here I am. I feel exhausted all the time for three days. I sleep but I wake up almost as exhausted as when I went to bed. They say it’s just for a limited moment but right now I really cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel. At the same time this is the only job I have for the moment. I lied at work just to try to have a little less to do. I was caught. I survived, the patient too. Still, I’m in charge of my life theoretically so I should be able to find solutions to make this thing work for me or find another source of income. I’m the one abusing myself by staying in this situation. What I can do is start looking for alternatives. Even if in the end I decide to stay in medicine it will be good to have other streams of income coming at the same time. I don’t know when I’ll be able to focus on it, but I know I deserve a better life and I owe it to myself to do all I cane to give myself a healthy lifestyle. Yes, I feel better now, it worked!! Thank you, Universe, (and Mel Robbins and Struthless)!!

My job is a great teacher I did the “Judge your neighbor worksheet” on the resentment I have for how much my current job is demanding and tiring. Here’s what came out: I need myself to be slower and less demanding. I need my job to be faster and more demanding (as it will inevitably become in July). I look forward to getting to the point of burnout again as it’s from these moments that I learned the most about what is really important for me: I learned the importance of self-care, clear communication and boundaries. I need to start to be more proactive about my learning and patient management. I can choose to be a simple worker doing a job that helps her have a living and be independent economically. I love my job because of the workload and the long hours: I keep going back to it It makes me very conscious about how I spend my free time. Tomorrow I theoretically have a meeting with my boss to get feedback on this first month at the job. I know I did a less that mediocre job at times and I’m fine with it as it was the best that I could do at the moment. I wanted to take a minute to contemplate on my experience during this first month: The beginning was very hard as I didn’t expect to have so little support from the secretaries, and I had no structure on how to organize my tasks. Now it’s getting a little better and I hope that by the end of the four months period I will stay there I’ll be able to be up to date with my medical records without working from home. BTW my contemplation about my workplace non negotiables ended up giving me a new D statement: My Values: Authenticity Truth Honesty Peace Well being My what: Using Integrative medicine to help people own their healing Having a lean, strong and beautiful body. Having a partner that I love, admire and inspire. Having a group of friends with common values and aspirations. Being financially free.

My life, my choices I did the one belief at a time worksheet on the belief “My job is awful and it will never get better.pdf “ and realized how it’s totally not about my job but about the choices I made that brought about my current reality. One of the reasons I went into med school was the fact that I saw it as an all-encompassing career that would have left me no time or energy to reflect on being alone when I came home, as at the time I didn’t want to get married nor have children. How cruel was I to myself! Even if I’m not married and I don’t have children I deserve to still have some energy left to take care of myself when I get home. Since it worked wonders with love, I decided to do a list of non-negotiables for work.

Hard times? It’s been 3 rough weeks since I started working as a Resident in Internal Medicine. Lots of work and even more emotions all around. For the first time in three years of therapy I cried during a session with my therapist. It was very releasing as I felt better the day afterwards. As time went on I accepted more easily the workload. Of course now that I feel a little more at ease with the work on the ward it’s time for a new challenge: tomorrow I’ll start on call shifts. I feel like my whole life is a personal growth journey interspersed with medical knowledge here and there. Finishing Medical school was hard, and I learned I needed to focus on being confident. My first two years of Residency in Sardinia helped me ground the fact that I had the skill needed until I decided to come to Switzerland and I felt again not enough for the task but despite the hardship and the suffering I somehow made it and I was even offered a supervisor position. Same thing with this Internal medicine thing. I guess the Universe will continue punching me in the face until I learn to trust myself and have compassion for myself, knowing that the true goal is to learn (and keep patients safe in the process...), and not to appear brilliant all the time. So, thank you Universe for the lesson, hopefully I’ll soon start embodying it!! Otherwise:

Why I think that’s the most important question for everything I do. This week I started working in an Internal Medicine ward and it was very stressful and hard for me. I’ll be there for the next four months and I may stay there longer and/or come back sometime in the future. Why do I torture myself then? I want to become a general practitioner and be able to practice integrative medicine. My guiding principle is “helping people get healthier through consciousness”. To get my Internal Medicine specialization I need to get through this Residency. I am fortunate enough to live in the Youtube era so I found a lot of how to, tips and tricks to survive Residency and stay healthy all along. I’ll apply the tips and find out what works best for me. It’s hard but it’s possible!!

Clarity first, then action Maybe I’m just procrastinating on the I don’t even know how many overdue reports I have for work but I felt like pausing for a moment. The last two days I was forced to physically pause as I had a bad cold and slept almost the whole two days. Now I have a little more energy but, as always, so many things to do. And to clarify too. The most unclear one is the renewed relationship I’m in with my ex-boyfriend. I feel like I’m stuck in the “friends with benefit phase”: since we started reconnecting, we are more “friends” in the sense that I feel like I can be myself around him and I trust him. And, apart from this weekend when I was sick, sex is getting better and better as I am able to tell him things I used to be too ashamed to share. As superficial as it may be, I don’t like his looks. What a good problem to have!! With my accountability partner we came to the resolve that 3-6 months is a good time to gauge a relationship. We’ve now been re-dating for two months. I’ll give myself six months in total. The interesting thing is that we plan on going on vacation together in the end of June, so it will either be a confirmation vacation or a goodbye one. The other area I need crystal clarity in is my goals and plans. I seem to always overschedule myself and then get overwhelmed, disappointed, or sick. The new rule to overcome this planning fallacy is to double the time I think every task will take me. Starting from the reports I have for work: I now know I need 8 hours to do all of them. I’ll start now and do the rest tomorrow morning. I should be able to finish or at least do a significant chunk of them!! What is measured is managed!!

Why That’s the most important thing, right? I think I lost it somewhere and my job became more of an endless series of nonsense chores than working towards “using integrative medicine to help people own their healing” or the original “to do plenty of research and public speaking to make people healthier through consciousness”. The plot twist on the question right now is “why is it so hard for me to extend to myself the same grace I show to my patients?”. I can be very hard on myself: I create unrealistic goals and then get disappointed if I don’t attain them.. I will definitely change that!! I’m so glad I started therapy: personal growth is good but the foundation therapy gives me is peerless: it’s my therapist who made me realize today this unrealistic goal making thing. Creating a realistic schedule has been a challenge my whole adult life, to the point that at a certain point I stopped doing them altogether. But apparently, they are useful. I’ll use the next week to finish the tidying up campaign I started and create a realistic schedule. So, why do I do what I do? I chose to study medicine for three main reasons. I wanted to help people; Somebody told me it would be good for the prestige of my family; I didn’t want to get married or have kids and I guessed it was such an engaging career that coming back home I wouldn’t have had the energies to reflect on how empty my life really was. I guessed well in a certain sense. But right now I do want to get married and I even have moments where I flirt with the idea of becoming a parent and it makes the long hours I work a lot less appealing. Regarding the prestige part, I have definitively uncovered the Pandora box on its shallowness. What remains is helping people. Sometimes I don’t really feel like I’m helping them. But in at least 80% of cases I think I do indeed, even if not yet in the way that I would like. Wouldn’t it be funny to be able to discuss with a patient who comes for a leg fracture why they think it happened and what the Universe want to tell them through that accident? Here’s another why: I love studying, understanding things and then explaining to people. In the end it’s not even about helping people, I just love doing it!! Does it mean I should become a researcher instead of doing more clinical work? I do enjoy interacting with patients too, even if sometimes it can be hard depending on their stories. In summary here’s why I am a doctor: I love studying, understanding and explaining things to people. Beautiful!!

Self-love is action This is one of the main mantras of one of my coaches. I haven’t been embodying this truth so much lately. I was a lot into the flow of doing what I felt like doing and relaxing a lot. That’s good but at the same time I stopped doing the little exercise I was doing and right now my pussy has a funky smell because I left a cup for too long. I’m very dedicated to my work and I out of my way in great amounts for the well being of my patients yet I don’t do relatively easy thing for my own wellbeing. Self-care is work apparently and I am worthy putting the same amount of effort I put towards helping my patients into helping myself be at my best!! I decided to write a D-Love Manifesto. The first step will be to define what self-love is. So, Self-Love is: Sleeping 8 hour per day Working out (doing burpees, walking, running or in the best-case scenario, doing CrossFit) Brushing my teeth at least 2 times per day Taking a shower when I come back from work Planning my days and clarifying in advance what I want to do in my non-working time Planning chores and things like manicure and pedicure Doing my morning and evening routines Drinking enough water Dancing!! Changing a menstrual cup frequently enough and little efforts like this So, here is the D-Love Manifesto I, Diane, herein declare my commitment to putting all the effort I am capable of into taking care and fortify my body, my mind and my spirit. I can only help and love others to the level that I am and do de same towards myself. As I do to myself so shall be done to others.

Dear 2022 Inspired by the one and only Eddie Pinero , I want to write something to you too, dear 2002. Thank you for all the lessons you thought me. I am a completely different person today from the one I was 365 days ago. I am at peace with myself, I know I have qualities and at the same time I accept my imperfections. There is still work to do of course but it will be done from a much more peaceful place, without the frantic restlessness of needing to be perfect to be worthy of my own love and care. Thank you for bringing back my ex-boyfriend in my life in the end. We met a few days ago and decided to have a new label-free relationship based on radical honesty. So far it’s been incredibly good: I was able to tell him all the suffering I experienced while we were together and it was very liberating, whereas if we hadn’t have the opportunity to speak again I would have had to continue working through it for who knows how long. I am immensely grateful for having had the idea of re-listening to the book “Radical Honesty”. I hadn’t really got the memo the first time, but this time I’m implementing what Brad Blanton says and it makes life so much lighter!! It’s uncomfortable at times but, with the consciousness I have now, I’d rather be uncomfortable than live in a web of comfortable but incessantly distressing lies. <3 I’ve just downloaded the idea that 2023 will be the year of disruption!! And it starts today: for the first time since I have salary, this year I won’t adhere to the Italian tradition of wearing new red lingerie on New Year’s Eve. It’s a bit of a superstition and a waste of money, a little bit as with a lot of other things, its origins do not come from a consumer society… I will probably wear red lingerie anyway, but it won’t be a new set. Cheers to my wallet and welcome 2023!!

I love my problems I've been thinking pretty often about my ex boyfriend and it's been mostly positive or at least neutral thoughts. I also felt that he would write me for Christmas and he did. We had a nice conversation and greed to keep communicating, this time with a rule of radical honesty. At the same time old feelings and fears came back about what happened and how bad I felt during that relationship. The question is : do I want to stay in communication with him or not? Because in the long run I don't see us coming back together as a couple, it would be just a new friends with benefit thing. The other "problem" I have is that I'm not studying right now, as I feel overwhelmed by all the things I wish I knew already and don't. Let's make it easy: I can only go little by little for studying, no amount of worrying will ever help me know more than what reading even one line of book will. Concerning my ex boyfriend I'll follow the radical honesty rule and we'll see how it goes. I do love my first world first class problems!!

Giving gratitude It’s the only thing I can do, really!! Ok, I could do many other things to but that’s the one that feels the more compelling right now. I’m here, in the comfort of my couch, listening to Estas Tonne and enjoying the beautiful life I get to live!! This morning I went for a run and almost effortlessly ran 7km in 38 minutes, not the best time ever but still a success!! And I had the opportunity to receive in my apartment my “uncles” in the city I live in. They’re not my direct uncles but they helped me a lot when I first arrived in Switzerland!! <3 Moment by moment of amazement, that's how I live now. Thank you Universe and thank you to the me(s) who brought me here!!

It’s about helping the patients It’s always useful to review the basics. Today made me remember how it’s NEVER about me in my work, it’s not about showing off how great of a doctor/person I am. So, it's better for everybody that I show things as they are and stop trying to portray them in the most convenient way for me. And it’s ok to say out loud that I did a mistake or forgot something. I’m human, I’m imperfect by nature and there’s nothing wrong in that. Hopefully I’ll remember it next time, otherwise I’ll learn it again. Thank you, Universe, for your relentless commitment to help me learn things!! <3

The year I got past my obsession for finding love I’ve already done my review for 2022 but I don’t think I mentioned something I’m noticing more and more right now: thanks to the experiences I had this year (accumulated with all the other adventures I lived the past few years), I can proudly say I am cured from my obsession for finding love. Maybe I will eventually find it or maybe not but I don’t feel the rush anymore and I look to all the past experiences with a smile and a lot of gratitude, even the ones that made me suffer because I got ghosted or I let them took away my power. I learned so much, most of all about my value: there is no man who is "out of my league" and it's ok to have boundaries and not settle for less than what I'm looking for. And most of all, I can't expect from someone else a love I am not willing to give to myself first. Just for the sake of clarity, dear Universe, I’m wide open to receiving love in any way or form, I’m just confident enough now to know that I deserve the love I want, beginning from my non negotiables, which, if you’re still listening, are: Same level of consciousness or higher (working on himself) No kids and doesn't want kids for the next 5-10 years Deep communication and intimacy Respect Exclusivity Financial stability (same level as me or more) Open to travel Voilà, I’ll continue do my job and let you do yours. Thank you in advance for what’s already mine, I feel so much love and joy right now!! It’s just incredible!!! So actually, do what you want: I’ll just keep falling more and more in love with me, anything else is just a topping on the gorgeous cake that I am already!!