I thought that once medical training ended and the Done With Training (DWT) position began, everything would miraculously change for the better.
Well... it did, in many ways.
But it required sacrifices.
While his decades of dedication have yielded unbelievable advances in therapeutics for patients with rare blood cancers, I was often home alone, raising my two girls while trying to launch my career.
Hint: it crashed before it could even get off the ground.
What Stoicism actually taught me
The Daily Stoic didn't hand me a fix. It handed me a question I could ask every single day: is this in my control, or isn't it?
My husband's call schedule? Not in my control. Whether the conference is in October, right when I need him home most? Not in my control.
What was in my control: how I spent the hours I actually had. Who I built community with. What I did with my own ambition, even in small, imperfect pieces, instead of waiting for a version of life that had enough space in it.
It helped me find radical acceptance of things outside my control (which is a lot), and build a life that was truly mine outside of medicine.
That radical acceptance is how I was able to dream up Homes for Healers, if I'm being honest.
Why this matters if you're in it right now
If you're a few years into this life as a physician spouse, holding the house together while someone else's career accelerates on a timeline you didn't set, I want you to hear this clearly.
If you’re angry about how different this life looks from the one you expected, I understand. But you don’t have to wait twenty years to find some relief from it.
Start smaller than I did. Pick one thing this week that's actually yours to control. It could be tiny. A morning routine, a single conversation, one hour blocked off that's just for you. That's where the peace starts. In building a life that is yours outside of medicine.
The part I'd tell my younger self
I'd tell her the crash wasn't the end of the story. It just meant the timing was wrong, not that the ambition was.
I'd tell her the anger made sense, and that it would eventually have somewhere better to go.
And I'd tell her to find her version of The Daily Stoic a lot sooner than almost two decades in.
Aditi Pemmaraju, J.D. is the founder of Homes for Healers®, a Houston real estate advisory built specifically for physicians and medical families relocating to, around, or eventually out of the Texas Medical Center.
