Playing Doctors On Television

It's 1AM and this could make no sense. Can you tell I was just watching House MD?

Hospital dramas make me stressed and sympathetic. Yes, for the patients - how they drag out their issue for 45 minutes and only find a solution, if any, until the end of the episode - but when I really get nervous is when I step outside the narrative. When I start thinking about all those medical terms the actors have to memorise and the heightened emotional state they have to keep up. It’s a farfetched comparison, but I often feel that in everyday life that I’m just using fancy words and feigning emotions to impress people. I feel like an actor playing a doctor on television.

I suppose my point could be just as easily made without the doctor metaphor… I just feel like an actor. And what’s strangest is that I’m so good at playing a part in my personal life, yet when it comes to my career - where I actually do have to play a role - I immediately feel like a fraud; an imposter.

With acquaintances, I’m incapable of stripping down to my foundation; a human; the ‘actor’.

I become something that’ll surely impress them all; a performer; a doctor on television.

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