“Are you still practicing?” is the wrong question

An excerpt from I Left Anyway: The Life I Was Supposed to Want.

The schedule looked ordinary, which almost made it harder to explain. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The computer screen asked me to log in again because five minutes of stillness was enough for it to decide I had disappeared. There was no collapse that day, no scandal, no final straw that would make the story easy.

I washed my hands, knocked on doors, asked about bowel habits, appetite, bleeding, pain. I reviewed medications and reassured patients while my body moved through the rooms. I knew where the smallest gloves lived. I knew which fax machine jammed. I knew how to hear the fear underneath a casual question.

I knew exactly how to be useful.

For years, medicine had been the world where I made the most sense. It taught me to steady my nerves when the stakes were high, move quickly without looking frantic, stand in the doorway of someone else’s terror and still sound calm. Eventually, that skill followed me home and became a way of life. Stay composed. Stay useful. Keep going. Need very little.

Achievement over attunement.

My white coat was draped over the back of the chair, the pockets still full of pens and folded patient instructions. There it was, the answer to every question I had ever been asked. What do you do? Doctor.

The word explained me before I had to explain myself. It gave me credibility in rooms where I might otherwise have had to earn it slowly. I chose that identity at seventeen, with the confidence of someone who did not yet understand what a single path can cost. Medicine chose me back, and I gave it what it asked for. I became excellent at something difficult, and that excellence gave me stability, respect, and a place in the world.

Calling it burnout would have made the story easier, and less true. I was not fleeing a profession I hated. I was not done being a doctor. That life worked. It had also become too narrow for the version of me waiting to emerge.

Once I loosened my grip on full-time clinical practice, I felt exposed. I had spent years being the person in the room who knew what to do. Suddenly, I was someone who did not know how the rest of her life was supposed to work.

So I started doing things I had no business being good at yet. I traveled solo without a clean plan. I went to countries where I did not know the language and forced myself to speak anyway. I began learning French, my third language. I had spent years sounding competent. Now I had to mispronounce basic words in public and survive the embarrassment.

Then there was the water.

For most of my life, I could not swim. The first time I tried to relax in open water, my body fought as if it were being attacked. I swallowed saltwater. I panicked in waist-deep water and hated the indignity of it. Medicine had trained me to assess, intervene, and control whatever could be controlled. The ocean required surrender, but surrender did not mean passivity. It demanded attention. It punished panic.

I kept going back. I learned to swim, earned my scuba certification, and kept diving until I became the person other divers could rely on. During a drift dive, I pulled an instructor out of the ocean after he ran out of air. Two years later, I became a scuba diving instructor and a certified freediver.

I also entered rooms I never would have entered as the neatly packaged version of myself, places where adults spoke openly about desire, consent, boundaries, and the body without pretending these subjects belonged in the shadows. I studied shibari and became a rigger, learning rope as structure, communication, trust, and attention. This was not a hobby phase. It was a confrontation with all the selves I had postponed in order to become excellent at one.

Medicine can make us extraordinarily capable while narrowing the acceptable shape of our lives. The title becomes a kind of architecture. It gives structure, but it can also become a room without windows, a room where the ceiling sits too low. At some point, I had to ask whether the life that made me understandable to other people was still large enough for the person I was becoming.

At the end of that ordinary clinical day, I logged out of the electronic medical record. The screen went blank. Around me, medicine continued as it always had. The world respected this version of me, and I respected her too. She had worked hard. She had cared. She had earned her authority. I did not want to turn her into a cautionary tale just because I was learning to want a wider life.

People ask me now, “Are you still practicing?”

It sounds practical, but I have come to think it is the wrong question. What most people are asking is whether I still fit inside the version of doctor they know how to recognize. Do I still stand in the same room, with the same schedule, under the same fluorescent lights, doing the kind of work that makes my identity easy to categorize? The question turns medicine into a binary. Practicing or not practicing. In or out. Doctor or something else. It leaves little room for the ways a medical life can evolve.

A better question is, how am I living now? More expansively. More curiously. With less need to prove the value of every choice before I make it.

Medicine is still woven through my life, but it no longer dictates the entire pattern. It lives in how I write, how I advise, how I listen, and how I move through uncertainty. It lives in the discipline I bring to creative work and the attention I pay to what people do not say. The work changed shape, but the training and experience did not vanish. What changed was that I stopped asking medicine to contain all of me.

Samantha Nazareth is a gastroenterologist.