Missing Physical Therapy
I’m a DPT who left the field and went into another very lucrative field. That being said, I’ve been doing this job 3.5 years and feel like I’m crawling out of my skin. I feel like I’ve got golden handcuffs. I drive at minimum 3-4 hours a day, at minimum. I am up and on the road at 515 am every single day, and I’m so sick of feeling like I have zero life outside of work. Prior to this, I tried everything in PT from a setting perspective. I even owned my own business and thrived at it. It was my absolute dream and for reasons outside of my control due to COVID, I had to shut it down.
I really grew to love owning my own business when I did, but I had someone that did the bookkeeping/billing/insurance side of it and felt totally micromanaged ALL the time. I’m talking calls at 10:30 at night. Emails or texts at 2:30 in the morning. You name it. I’m not sure why this person was like this, but I really felt it ruined the entire experience for me of being a business owner. After this, I left the field and didn’t come back.
I’m trying to sort out why I’m feeling this pull back to PT, why I’m wanting to get out of this career I’ve been in for the past 3.5 years and have excelled very well at, and it seems to come down to a number of factors.
Freedom of time. I really miss my mornings OR being home at a decent time at night. I work 10-12 hour shifts at minimum 3-4 days a week. When I owned my own PT business, I worked a ton but loved it because it was my own business.
Micromanagement. I seem to really hate being micromanaged. I also just quite honestly hate working for other people. I’ve never been great at taking direction and smell narcissistic, toxic behavior from a mile away and have found that a lot of very, very successful business people have narcissistic tendencies and are also very micromanagey.
Complete Ownership/Entrepreneurship. Although I owned my business, I didn’t really have anything to do with the billing process or anything along those lines. I don’t think I got to truthfully run my business the way I personally would have run it, and felt things were cut short business wise because of COVID, living in a VHCOL area and suffering financially after trying to make the business work for so long once things shut down.
Quality of life. I can’t remember the last time I worked out twice or three times in a week, meal prepped, or felt great about myself from a mental or physical standpoint. I have gained 20 pounds and feel like a total SLUG. I’m not obese by any means, but I’m afraid if I keep down this road, I’ll continue to self sabotage. I’m also never, ever home during the day and don’t have a way to heat up lunch or meal prep because of the nature of the job I’m in.
Anyways, I guess I’m coming here to say, the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, even if you’re making 2-3x what you were as a PT. I’ve still got my license and keep up on it, and I’m seriously considering getting back into it as my own business owner, building this out on the side until I get to a point where I can go full time with it. If anyone has any words of encouragement or thoughts, I’d love to hear them. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Also, sorry for not sharing the field of work I’m in, I’d like to stay as anonymous as possible, respectfully.