So I played ER doctor for a while:

Me: How can I help you today?

Patient: Well I think it started when I set my cat's tail on fire.  It was it just left this big burn patch when I tried to put it out with the carpet.  So now I am going to lose my rent deposit, too.  I have to move in 5 days since my rent check bounced. You know they hardly give you anything on social security. That cat gets up on the table but I had lit a candle.  That wasn't cheap.  Of course I took him to get looked at.  They say his fur will grow back eventually.  But I don't have any place to move since I won't get my deposit.

Me: Ma'am it says here you came for arm pain.

Patient: Well that has been there a long time.

Me: So let me start over.  How can I help you today?

I wish I could count the number of times I have said that.  Literally, what motivated you to sit around for hours in a room full of people with contagious diseases so that you could tell me a convoluted story about how you set your cat's tail on fire?  Or tell me about your abdominal pain that has been on going for 6 years and is closely followed by your PCP, GI specialist, and neuropath?  What can I add to your already complete work up?  I wish I could fix all that walked through that door but one thing was clear, every day I felt like a failure because I really couldn't offer the help that people needed.

At first I just fantasized.  Then I quit.

Yup, I quit in honor of my 36th birthday.  This is the year that something is suppose to happen.  I suppose that I could sit around and wait for it but I fully acknowledge that sometimes we have to give fate a little nudge. Things that happen this year will be the result of years of accumulated choices and I believe that the decisions I take now could launch me in completely different trajectories.

I watch my friends finish their degrees, get a good job, get married, buy a house and have a couple of kids.  They seem happy.  This seems so normal.  I do not begrudge them that they have managed to live such normal lives.  Sometimes I am even jealous, but I simply realize that somewhere I got off track.  It is like looking at a child's growth chart and suddenly discovering that they have fallen off the cure.  Normal just isn't working. I lack a job I am willing to settle into and be a good little comrade.  I lack a spouse to share the "joys" of home ownership.  I want nothing to do with offspring.  It is finally time to make this path my own, even if it isn't on trend.