I went through basically the exact same scenario very recently!
I had a beautiful, loving, wonderful girlfriend who was trying to go to pharmacy school (as her mom had). I've always been an activist, and she was apolitical--From the get go, I told her I didn't think it would work, due to that conflict. But, we kept seeing each other and soon I was so addicted to her that I begged her to stay with me despite what I said before. She had some kind of alluring and happy vibe that drove me crazy (she's never been depressed, I've suffered depression since age 12, partly due to reflecting on politics).
One day, before I started my student teaching at the local high school, I decided that I may as well brew some ayahuasca, because the way my life is going it looks like I won't have time for that stuff later on. I didn't expect much--I didn't believe it could possibly be true that any drug could allow you to see the entire universe at once. Suffice to say that ayahuasca was the most important experience I ever had. I remembered choosing to be born to my parents, and I remembered why I was born, which is to help others remember why *they* were born.
Of course I explained all of this to my girlfriend, but she was less than enthused. She liked going to clubs with her girlfriends and drinking, but psychedelics to her sounded really crazy.
At that point, I basically knew we would not last much longer. The breakup process took many months, because we loved each other so much. We still do (though she has a better matched bf now--he's in the Marines).
I've also just decided to quit my job as a pharm-tech. The guilt of giving out these awful drugs to people was too much. And the straw that broke was a couple of Xanax-addled dudes that came into McDonalds trying to start a fight with the cashier. They were out of their minds. They kept asking me if I took "Xanies." I told them to try some iboga rootbark... but that probably sounded like gibberish to them.
I definitely feel a calling to work in mental health, but even more than that, I want to find a way to create a self-supporting, holistic homeless shelter (which I would live in). My next, and hopefully last, girlfriend, will be someone who would love to live with and help homeless people. Or else I'll just stay single forever. Breaking up hurts me way too much.
P.S. I needed to correct this...:
Hyperspace Fool wrote:There is a reason why MD's have 20 year lower life expectancy than normal trans-fat chomping couch potatoes. Cigarette smokers outlive them by 10 years. Being a cigar smoking heroin junkie who eats fast food gives a longer life expectancy. And, doctors are supposed to know what is good for us, right?
(quoted from:
http://forums.studentdoc.../index.php/t-367429.html):
It's a myth.
Maverick veterinarian Joel Wallach is selling video and audio tapes titled Dead Doctors Don't Lie! proclaiming that physicians have a life expectancy of only 58 years. This sends the message that doctors are so wrongheaded that they themselves live significantly shorter lives than the general population.
It is not clear where Wallach gets his data, but it is a lie. Physicians have long had life expectancies that are longer than the general population. Goodman [1] reviewed reports on physician life expectancies in 1925, 1938-42, 1949-51, and 1971. His study covered the 1971 population of 344,823 physicians, and the deaths of 19,086 from 1969 through 1973. He found that both male and female physicians had greater life expectancy than the general population.
The American Medical Association's Center For Health Care Policy published data on the life expectancies of U.S. medical graduate physicians by specialty in 1988. [2] It showed that the life expectancy of physicians is somewhere between 75 and 88, depending upon the age and gender that one chooses.
Source:
http://www.ncahf.org/nl/1996/3-4.htmlClick here (http://www.vet-task-force.com/Wallach.htm) for more info.