I don’t know if it’s just the time of year. Maybe it’s the waning sunlight, heralding my impending succumbing to seasonal affective disorder. Maybe September has never been a good month for me, and October is always about trying to figure out where I went wrong.

You would think that, after a few decades, I would have some sort of idea.

Today, I find myself questioning my purpose in life. Oh, don’t get me wrong. This is probably something I do every day. But it’s usually a brief thought, a transient crack in my already fragile, crumbling ego. For all this time, there has been one thing that has propelled me through time, that has allowed me to endure the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” as it were. It was, admittedly, never a very good reason. But it was a reason.

Despite all my high-minded rhetoric, my desire to do the right thing, and my wish to live a fulfilling life, the only concrete goal I’ve ever crafted for myself was that I wanted to be a doctor.

As of June 30, 2008, that journey had officially come to an end. I am now a full-fledged board-eligible internal medicine physician and pediatrician, and, as much as I’ve entertained the thought, I don’t really have the wherewithal to go on with any further training. From here on out, anything I do is entirely of my own volition, and not due to the requirements of some educational accreditation organization. (OK, that’s probably overstating things, but I’m drawing to illustrate a point.)

So it isn’t very surprising that I am feeling incredibly, profoundly lost right now.

I don’t know if it’s a cultural trait, or simply the unspoken mythology of my mother’s side of the family. Underlying everything, perhaps, is this sense of duty. Of responsibility. Oh, the responsibility of power is one thing. When I’m working under the aegis of my profession, it is almost terrifyingly easy to wield this responsibility. This is the Thing™ I have set out to Do, after all.

But then there is personal responsibility. The thing that I’ve learned is that I have a hard time with this form of responsibility. I struggle with it daily. I barely survive that struggle at times. If not for a lot of help from my friends, and my family, I would certainly have died or have killed myself by now. It’s amazing, considering that I can literally be responsible for life and death at any given moment, but I guess that’s the trick of things. It’s easier to be responsible for other people that it is to be responsible for yourself.

The day-to-day things I need to do to keep myself alive and a functioning member of society are, at best, annoying trifles, at worst, nearly unmovable burdens. At times, it seems a lot easier to keep someone alive, to make someone well, than it is to keep myself going. I can’t explain it. There is clearly something wrong with me.

But as long as I had a Purpose™, I could endure it. I have been steadfast, though perhaps somewhat dim-wittedly, unquestioningly so. I have ascribed certain failures in my life as sacrifices to the Purpose™, have foregone any hope of happiness in certain regards and used the Purposeâ„¢ as an excuse.

And now that the Purpose™ is for all intents fulfilled, the cowardice of my inaction is laid bare.

There are things that I have failed at, things I have refused to pursue, for the simple reason that I was afraid, and, until now, I’ve always had a plan to fall back on.

Now all my plans seem to lead nowhere, actually. Part of it is that I just want to be still for a while. Perhaps a long while. I just want to stop struggling, stop striving, and just let the current carry me, even if the current throws me off a 100 ft precipice, dashing me against the cruel sharp rocks below. I’ve literally travelled thousands of miles and spent dozens of years to achieve my Purpose™, and right now, I just want to lie here and not do anything. Perhaps I just reached too far, and now that I’ve been cursed with exactly the thing that I wanted, I’m realizing everything else that I’ve given up in order to achieve it, and I’m not entirely sure it was all worth it. Oh, “what if?” In all reality, there was no “what-if.” This is, was, will always be the path that I have taken, and as much as I long for alternate pathways and timelines, there was probably nothing I could’ve done.

The one thing that I am certain of, the one thing that leaves a hollow pit in the bottom of my stomach, that keeps me lying awake at night listening to the silent darkness, is that whatever it is that you want in life that is worth having always, always, always requires a lot of hard work and sacrifice. Oh, sure, there are a lot of other things I would like out of life, but I no longer think I have what it takes to get them. I no longer have that sheer, singlemindedness that got me to where I am today.

I’m just really tired. My soul is damaged and broken in a lot of important ways. And I’m exceedingly lonely.

There is a part of me that wants to know what else there is in life. A childish, whiny, emo part of me, to be sure. A part that just wants things to be, but isn’t really brave enough to go out there and make those things become.

There is a part of me that is resigned to the idea that that’s all there is, there ain’t no mo’, and the rest of my life is going to be relatively unchanging, and I’m going to die this way, without passing any more milestones, without experiencing any other sort of personal joy. Oh, I’ll play witness to lots of other people’s joys and sorrows, but that’s it. I’m only going to be a passenger. A spectator.

My question is a typical one. A hackneyed, trite cliché. Is there any further purpose in my life? Was I wrought to do aught else on this mortal plane? Or is this it? The One Thing™? The task of a hundred thousand million little things and small trifles, from which no great glory can be won. Of which no songs or stories are ever written. I guess it’s really a lot better than nothing.

The only thing that really kills me is the suffocating loneliness.

But I suppose you can’t have everything.