I hesitated to put a question mark at the end of this title, since I actually asked myself the question for a while, even though the answer was constructed quite precisely afterwards.
It is a rather peculiar and personal article that I am delivering here, but I wish to release this word that has often been killed for the sake of decency, and I think that it is not a favour to society to whisper to it what it wants to hear.
Genesis of a vocation
By the time I was 17 years old, I had already entered the digital age (well before many companies did you think!) through a blog, and my priorities were to satisfy my parents' educational ambitions while maintaining an intense social life, like almost all my classmates.
After dissecting a mouse in Life and Earth Sciences class, and concerned about the well-being of my fellow human beings, I naturally went to the benches of the Faculty of Medicine, with the idea of becoming a great surgeon, since the time the system had been asking me to fill out the "career guidance" box.
Finally, it was the midwifery profession that opened my arms to me, and moved by my first birth on an observation day, I decided to embrace this fascinating profession.
The intensity and the demands of the training rhythm leave little time to step back, and animated by the permanent challenges to be met, my main ambition was to carry out this schooling in order to finally experience the pleasure of becoming an employee.
Five years of practice
On leaving school, I was offered an open-ended contract in a private clinic, and I accepted without too much hesitation.
I could compare those five years to a rock star career. The first times, you get nervous, the daily life is made of permanent learning. Afterwards, a cruising rhythm sets in, where the craze and mastery of the profession make the days unforgettable. And then one day, we get tired of what we have...
"My nature is never to settle for what I acquire."
The weariness of repetitive tasks sets in. The organizational dysfunctions and conflicts they sometimes create are perplexing. The egos of some partners who try to absorb you like a black hole create a fracture. The mutual misunderstandings with the different interlocutors incite you to rethink the situation.
An observation of failure
What's disturbing about this type of situation is that the comfort they provide keeps you like a dog on a leash. Worse still, comfort, which at first glance sounds like a positive element, is actually full of perverse side effects. Sit on your comfortable sofa and you won't have to do anything all day.
I tried to analyze this fatigue, since the company kept repeating to me:"But it's a beautiful job! But the contact of people anyway...". Well, it's hard to believe that people's contact isn't enough. No matter how much you love your husband, you feel the urge to read a book or go to an exhibition. If human relationships were enough to find happiness, we would be right in the middle of it at the dawn of our seven billion planetary human beings. Anyway, I was longing for something else.
Moreover, the slowness of the modernization of the health system in the field, dehumanization, over-medicalization, and "undereffectivization" (note the neologism) seemed to me to be incompatible with their very essence. In fact, the best way to save money in the health care system is to eliminate it. Reducing costs, we agree, but at what price?