The Hard Truth About Dream Careers: Why They Feel Like a Troubled Marriage

Written by Alessandro Didiano (doctor in veterinary medicine, MRCVS)

Disclaimer: This article is personally written by me, a licensed veterinarian with more than a decade of clinical experience.

I still remember the scene very vividly, and it is actually one of my first memories ever. I was 4 year-old, and I entered the kitchen. My mother was chopping some vegetables and I said “Mamma, voglio fare il veterinario”, which in Italian means “Mom, I want to be a vet”.

My mom looked at me and said “ok, amore”.

I don’t remember how I came to that conclusion. Nobody in my family was a vet (or had any degree of any type), and we had no animals in the house or whom I had a regular interaction with. Even now, I have no idea what prompted my 4 year old brain to want to be a vet.

As years went by, people started to take interest when they noticed I hadn’t changed my mind yet. Every year, during the Christmas dinner, one of the several aunties would ask me “still want to be a vet?”, and they were quite surprised when the answer was “yes!”. I never went through the phase of the football player or the rock star or the astronaut. I just wanted to be a vet.

Throughout my childhood, my relationship with animals became very strong (interestingly, I developed a strong bond with animals after I decided I wanted to be a vet, and not the other way around). I would do whatever I could to help an animal in difficulty (there were plenty of those in the streets of Italian villages in the 90s) and I had no doubt that one day I would have found a way to save all the animals in the world (I still don’t know what I meant, but I kept saying this to my brother).

By my teen years, people around me actually knew: I would have tried all I could to enter Vet School.

Long story short, 15 years after I told my mother I wanted to be a vet, I was admitted to Vet School. And 5 and a half years after that, it finally happened: I became a doctor in veterinary medicine. 

I have a very vivid memory of the day of my graduation, when my mother reminded me of my entrance in the kitchen 20 years before. I thought about the 4 year-old me and thought “yes my boy, we made it”.

As I write this article, 11 years have gone by after my graduation. In these 11 years, I have treated thousands and thousands of animals and here I am, reflecting on my journey so far. 

 In the last few days, it just occurred to me to think that my relationship with veterinary medicine resembles the journey of a marriage. To start with, I felt a strong attraction to veterinary medicine, for reasons which even today I don’t fully understand. Then, veterinary medicine and I started dating (my childhood and teen years). We have been engaged for 5 and a half years (my Vet school years) and, finally, we got married, on the day I became a doctor in veterinary medicine. Boy, the day after my degree, I even made the most typical mistake of people in love: I tattooed the logo of veterinary medicine on my arm.

The first months of my marriage with veterinary medicine have been like a honeymoon. Every day I woke up smiling, because… I was a vet! I was starting my dream career, how many people could say to be as lucky as me? People do jobs they hate for most of their lives and, look at me, doing the thing I  had dreamed about for 20 years!

But then, like in every marriage…problems started. The novelty started to fade away and, slowly but surely, everyday life and drama started to happen. At the beginning I didn’t even notice it, it was just an emotion in the background, and I was not even aware of it. A case would go wrong, a client wouldn't be particularly pleasant, a shift would be particularly long or hard, a litter of unvaccinated puppies would die one by one under my eyes, an animal would start bleeding uncontrollably in surgery, someone would blame me for not having the money to treat their pets, someone would have a meltdown while I was euthanizing their sick pet, a dog would just release hemorrhagic diarrhea all over my consult room. And the list goes on and on and on.

And then there were the challenges of the industry itself. Unpaid or very underpaid internships, night shifts, extreme competition for one position. At some point, I decided to do an unpaid internship for 6 months (the learning opportunity was great, or at least that’s what I told myself) and to sustain myself I was working night shifts in another hospital. During this time, I consistently put in 100 hours per week, and my friends and family started to wonder what the hell was wrong with me.

One day, and this is another vivid memory, I woke up. It was three years after my graduation. I had just done a particularly hard night shift, where I had to call the police because someone had threatened to come down to “kill the vets that killed my boy” (the boy was a 17 year-old dog with heart and kidney failure). I made my way to the kitchen to get some coffee, and then it occurred to me. I hated veterinary medicine. I hated everything about it. My dream career had made me miserable. I had no social life, no girlfriend, and I barely saw my family. That day, for the first time I had this thought: I want to get out of veterinary medicine as soon as possible, before it destroys me. I stayed on the sofa of my studio apartment (all I could afford with my salary at the time) for hours, looking at the ceiling, and crying. Then, I got myself back together, and went to start another night shift.

8 years after this first meltdown, here I am. I am still a clinical vet. I have done more internships. I have worked in small surgeries and big hospitals. I met colleagues who became friends for life and even a couple whom I would prefer not to see ever again in my life.  I had other meltdowns. I had more times where I thought I had to leave veterinary medicine, sometimes consistently for several months. I even tried to see if I was suitable for other careers, and then came back to my childhood “dream” career.

The world is full of people having careers. But there is only a minority of people who are living their dream career. A dream career is characterized by a strong emotional attachment to it, something that goes beyond the paycheck at the end of the month. A dream career is a defining part of your identity and your psychology. Medicine (including veterinary medicine) is probably the king of the dream careers. There is no medicine without emotions. And the same goes for  many other careers, mostly in the fields of healthcare and social services, arts and entertainment, education and coaching, emergency and humanitarian work, entrepreneurship and business. 

These careers, I can promise you, are going to feel like a troubled marriage.

They are going to feel like a troubled marriage because at first, there’s passion, an all-consuming love that makes everything else fade away. But over time, that passion will fade, and what remains is the routine, the daily grind, the regular (and sometimes very frustrating) reality.

It will feel like a troubled marriage because there will be many bad days, days that make you wonder why you ever chose this path in the first place.

It will feel like a troubled marriage because resentment will creep in. You will start to feel let down, realizing that this career isn’t exactly what it promised to be. The dream version of it, the one you romanticized, will feel distant, almost unrecognizable

It will feel like a troubled marriage because you will notice all the other exciting possibilities around you—shiny new opportunities that seem easier and more fulfilling. But pursuing them would mean walking away, essentially going through a “divorce.”

It will feel like a troubled marriage because you will often find yourself asking, “What if…?””. What if you had chosen differently? What if you had followed another passion? What if you had taken an easier road?

It will feel like a troubled marriage because, despite the hardships, this career will become an integral part of your identity. No matter how much pain it causes, people will associate you with it. Leaving won’t just be a career change, it will feel like losing a part of yourself.

However, and this is the magic of long-term commitment,  there is the other side of the coin too.

You will start to know them inside out, and every day you may discover something new about them.

You will still experience moments of magic, maybe brief, maybe rare, but when they come, they will make everything else worth it.

You will have moments when you will look at them and think, “Yes, I still love you.”

You will have moments when, despite all the struggles, you feel an unshakable sense of belonging—as if, no matter what, this is where you are meant to be.

You will have moments when you realize that, while the passion may not burn as brightly as before, it has transformed into something deeper, something more resilient.

You will have moments when you catch glimpses of your younger self, full of excitement and hope, and you smile, knowing that despite everything, you never truly gave up.

You will have moments when you see the impact of your commitment, the lives you’ve touched, the things you’ve built, the legacy you are creating, and in those moments, all the sacrifices will feel justified.

Because just like in a long-term relationship, true fulfillment doesn’t come from endless excitement or perfection. It comes from perseverance, from surviving the storms, from learning to fall in love over and over again with the same thing, even when it no longer looks the way it once did.

And that, in the end, is what makes it all worthwhile.

We are getting to the end of this article, if nothing else because I have to start a shift. Writing these words has been a form of therapy and here I am, wondering if I will be a veterinarian forever.

One thing is sure: my relationship with veterinary medicine has changed a lot and will keep changing. A month ago, I decided to leave my permanent job, so I could go free-lance and have more flexibility, so that I can be a  present partner and father, now that I have a baby on the way.

And then, I decided to do this: writing about veterinary medicine. Writing about my dream career that has been, in one way or another, an integral part of my life for the last 31 years, since my entrance into the kitchen when my mother was chopping the vegetables.

Every week I will write a post about pet health or a  “behind the scenes”, like this one. This is the next chapter of my marriage with veterinary medicine. Will I divorce? Will I stay? Who knows. But for now, here we are, changing and evolving together. And yes, veterinary medicine, I still love you.