We Are All Perfectly Fine: anecdotes in self-care

We Are All Perfectly Fine is a memoir written by a Canadian doctor, Dr. Jillian Horton, in Ontario on her training and journey into becoming a general internist, and her struggles when her own life falls apart due to the pressures and inherent nature of her career, crossing over with her personal life. Honestly, medicine has its own distinct culture that’s demanding, with lots of high achievers, emotionally tough, and deeply inspiring, and the culture of medicine obviously goes beyond singular, siloed interactions of clean appointments, prescriptions, and surgery cases. There is a lot of complex collaboration, compartmentalizing difficult emotions, and a far-from-perfect system of handling the responsibilities of healthcare.

Dr. Horton (or Jill) documents her five-day retreat to a place in upstate New York, and the connections and very human moments that are so precious and touching, that allows her to examine her life more carefully, and be more of an empathetic, and good, physician, later in her career. Lots of moments are just genuine human interaction — things that the best of us do when we consciously choose to bring it out and notice them, nothing that is out of the blue or unexpected or bedazzling, but just ordinary human emotions and human touch and human support. This books demonstrates (through Jill’s own life) how much stress physicians face, and reiterates the compassion in treating others and taking care of ourselves, because nothing is truly separate, and while we are caring for others, we often need to be taken care of too. We take care of our family members, and our family members also need care from other healthcare providers, just because we are human, and we always want to care. There’s guilt and grief and blame in this career but basically self-care is something that needs to come from deep-rooted compassion.