Changing career paths towards dry needling

I’m sick of this. I can’t keep trudging through, day by day, doing something I hate when I know exactly what I want to be doing with my life and how to get there. I have pretty much no desire to finish this medicine course, and even less to become a doctor, and yet that is exactly what I’m going to do. All of this is because, apparently, getting qualified as physiotherapist somehow isn’t enough for my parents. Instead, I’m trapped here, daydreaming of dry needling courses, wondering if my future happiness is nothing more than an impossibility.

My parents have always been pushers. They’ve pushed me to do better, jump higher, be smarter, push myself to breaking point. When I was younger, I thought they were doing it for my own good. Because they loved me. When I tried so hard on my final schooling exams that I almost broke, they lured me through with the promise of a fully funded gap year, anywhere in the world. The gap year was fantastic, I learnt so much about myself as a person and I realised where I was in life and where I wanted to go.

When I got back from my time overseas and confessed to my parents that I want to unenroll from medicine and pursue pain management and then focus on dry needling, they were shocked.

Without my asking they’d already decided to pay all my student debts in full, but in light of my change of heart, they revoked that offer. They told me that if I decided to move away and pursue my passion with a dry needling course based in Sydney, they’d cut me off. That I was betraying them and that they wanted no part in the future I’d created for myself.

After living with them in cold silence for a week, I came downstairs one morning to meekly apologise and tell them I’d decided to do medicine after all. I wasn’t strong enough to make the tough choice. I’m still not. Hopefully, one day I will be strong enough to follow my dreams and become qualified to administer dry needling.