I can remember it well.
There's a hill in Kirk Hallam in Ilkeston called Kingsway. In the spring, there are daffodils all in the middle as you drive off in your car; in the winter, not so much. I used to drive it every day to work, 45 to 50 minutes into my commute to Kirk Hallam.
Kirk Hallam is 100% dyed in the wool working class; it was built to serve the pipe works at Stanton in Ilkeston. It was a council estate entirely until in the 1980s and 1990s some people bought their houses. That's where I worked for 11 years for the husband and wife partnership between 1997 and 2008.
I remember often driving up Kingsway and being angry.
I'm not quite sure what I was angry about. Maybe it was the having to travel 50 minutes to get to work in a car, maybe it was that my kids hadn't slept at night, maybe it was that I wondered if there was more to life than driving to this NHS practice in the middle of nowhere, and how did I get here?
The anger would overspill to the dog walks in the evening. Sometimes I would just be angry, angry with my dog, angry with myself, angry with what I was doing.
It was around that time I realised 'my work existed to give me the life that I wanted'.
I realised that the life and work was not exactly what I wanted, and it wasn't enough that the life outside my work was.
It was around that time that I made substantial changes to my life.
I started to take wage cuts, left, right and centre. I gave up my capitation list for GDS, which was the money that I got paid a month just for having patients registered; it was thousands of pounds at that stage. I didn't want to be a general dentist anymore; I didn't like it, so I gave up the money for it and just went to take teeth out instead.
I took on people to work within my service even though I was an associate, which cost me money, but allowed me to move into doing implants more, to concentrate on it more, and to take myself out of just the grind of doing NHS oral surgery, and then I gave up restorative dentistry. Even though restoring the implants was really profitable, I didn't like it, so I did the thing that I liked.
Slowly, slowly, all the anger subsided.
The dog walks became a joy; in fact, I used them for speaking to people on the phone about my work. My poor dog Isa, that we lost last year, she was an expert in the GDC.
Ultimately, when they sold the practices and asked/told me to stay, I left. I took a 70% wage cut to go somewhere else, where I could walk to work and walk home from work. It was a totally different life.
It wasn't a plan to overcome that; it was just a necessity.
“Your work exists to give you the life that you want”.
That's what your work is for, not the other way around.
Blog Post Number - 4472