giuliapetrilli

I studied for six years to become a doctor, for four to become a psychiatrist. It took me a decade to realize what I really needed wasn’t the title I had been chasing, but a reset button. A blank page. In my thirties, with a promising career ahead of me, I felt stuck. Or rather, I felt unhappy.

At 18, I knew very little about work, money, or adult life. And yet, I was expected to decide what to study, what kind of life to build, and what profession to pursue. My parents, both doctors, never forced me to pursue a medical career; they never told me what to do. But when you are young, naïve, and lost, it’s easy to follow a path that has already been laid out for you. That is how I started studying medicine. Since I’ve always been a bookworm, studying all day long wasn’t a big deal. The problem was that I kept seeing the enthusiasm in my colleagues’ faces. With every subject we studied, they said, “I want to do this in residency,” while I was mentally crossing off one specialty after another, thinking, I can’t do this for the rest of my life.

I ended up in the psychiatric ward. Not as a patient, but as a resident. It felt almost right. Almost. There was always something slightly off. And after residency ended, I found a good job, or at least a well-paid one. Many people are unhappy at work (and we spend one-third of our lives there), but somehow, they stay. “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” my grandfather used to say, so it’s better to think twice before quitting a job. It seems like the old saying that money can’t buy happiness doesn’t mean much nowadays. But I had money, and I was unhappy. I started crying before going to work. How could I live like that for the rest of my life?

I kept looking for an answer to my existential doubts, and the answer came, fittingly, on a blank page. A Word document, to be exact. I started writing and rediscovered an old passion: telling stories. That’s a nice way of putting it, right? But I’m a doctor: I made rationality my religion. I needed something tangible. And two novels are not as tangible as being a psychiatrist.

After many Google searches – sometimes I use it as an oracle – and endless conversations with my friends, I found my Holy Grail: a purple page. It was the description of a master’s program in journalism at NYU. It had all I had always wanted. People passionate about writing. A path toward the right direction.

I had to spend a year just getting the language certificate (until then, I had never seriously studied English). Now I take classes from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m., thanks to the time zone. I drink liters of coffee to stay awake and take sleeping pills to fall asleep; my internal clock is definitely broken, and I’m more worried about the future than ever. But also, more alive than I have ever been.

Medicine was a clearly mapped path. You “simply” have to study, then you get into a residency, and then you find a job. There is a reason so many people in Italy try to get into med school: it feels safe. Once you enter, your life is more or less mapped out. People who had studied with me bought houses, got married, and had kids (while I’m spending all my money to study, again). Journalism, by contrast, offers no such guarantees. The competition is high, I’m writing in a language that isn’t my own, and sometimes I feel out of time.

But I have the chance to wake up and be happy about what I do.

I’m looking at the world through a new lens. I’m looking for real stories now. Some of them have already been published.

So, welcome to my page, which is no longer blank but filled with things I love.

I’m open to job opportunities and adventures.