Do you know what stressed me out the most in dental school?
Not the boards. Not the pharmacology exams. Not the 8am clinics where the attendings would watch you like a hawk.
My first wax-ups.
Specifically, carving the occlusal anatomy on a lower molar.
Every groove had to be right. The fossae, the ridges, the marginal ridges. I remember sitting there at 11pm under a lamp thinking: if I can't get this right, I'm going to fail. I'm going to fail dental school. I'm going to fail at dentistry. This is it.
That feeling was so loud, so certain, so final.
And then... it passed.
Nothing Stays
I got better at the wax-ups. The anxiety moved on, and attached itself to the next thing.
Boards anxiety → graduation excitement → residency fear → residency boredom → job excitement → job fear → wondering if this is all there is.
Every single one of those feelings felt permanent when I was in them. Every one of them ended.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it better than I ever could:
“Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final."
Four words. No feeling is final.
The Mistake We Keep Making
The problem isn't that we feel things deeply.
It's that we have too much riding on every moment.
Your pride. Your patients' outcomes. Your income, the one that has to service $300K in loans before it does anything else for you.
When you're carrying all of that, every hard moment doesn't just feel bad. It feels like evidence. Evidence that you chose wrong, that you're not cut out for this, that the walls are closing in.
So we grip. We attach. We let one bad crown prep, one unhappy patient, one brutal production week become the story we tell ourselves about everything.
And then, a few weeks later, we can barely remember what we were spiraling about.
It dissolved. Like it always does.
What This Actually Changes
When you stop treating every emotion like a final answer, something shifts.
The terror becomes tolerable. You don't have to fix it, solve it, or run from it. You just have to outlast it, because you will.
The excitement becomes sweeter. You stop trying to hold onto it so tight. You know it'll come around again.
And the in-between moments, the ordinary Sundays, the routine appointments, the unremarkable weeks — stop feeling like failure. They're just the space between feelings.
Rilke said beauty and terror. Not one or the other. Both. Keep going anyway.
💊 This Week's Prescription
Think of one thing that's exciting you right now. One thing that's terrifying you.
Now ask yourself: Am I making it mean more than it does?
Because six months from now, one of two things will be tru:
Either it worked out, or you survived it.
Either way, that feeling won't be the one you're sitting with.
Keep going.
— Dr. Mike
P.S. If you missed last week's articles: