Reframing your Calling

Shifting identity without losing your values

My friend Mara (not her real name) stood in the emergency department for what she knew would be her last shift.

After nearly a quarter century of treating cardiac arrests, traffic accidents, overdoses, and everything in between, she tells me that, that day, she felt nothing. Numb.

The week leading up to that last shift, though…that was a different story. She’d been flooded by a complex mix of emotions, a miasma of sadness, elation, freedom, and loss. All at once.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Mara and I trained together. We weren’t in the same program (I was on the surgical track, she in emergency medicine), but surgeons and ER docs intersect frequently. And Mara was—and still is—very good at what she does.

She has a preternatural calm in the face of chaos. Her mind is astonishingly agile—she can sort through a firehose of information to get to the diagnosis underneath stupid fast. And, she cares.

A lot.

Which is why, when her colleague asked her on her last day, “You’re really leaving? But you’re so good at this!” she finally broke.

The words stung, she told me later, even if they were intended as a compliment. And that’s because she’d been stuck in a quandary for at least three years: Yes, she was very good at what she did.