Why did I start studying for the MCAT?

I don’t have a background in sciences, and I already have a high-paying career as a software engineer.

Well, my childhood dream was to become a fighter pilot. Unfortunately, I spent most of my twenties in and out of depression and had very low self-esteem. It’s hard to know where that stemmed from, but I really struggled during my second time emigrating to a new place with a new language and culture.

Anyways, I decided to give my dream a try. But to become a military pilot in Canada, I first needed a degree.

I went back to school and completed a degree in computer science. I started working in the field and submitted my application to the Canadian Forces.

I must say it wasn’t the fastest process, but within the next two years, I went through all their extensive testing and was offered a position.

But by then, I was in a tough spot. My wife and I had a baby, and we had bought a townhouse at the absolute top of the market in 2021, right before it crashed. To say buying a house is one of my biggest regrets is an understatement. Sure, one can hope that in the long term, it’s worth it, but in the short term, it completely annihilated my dream of becoming a fighter pilot.

There was no way we could pay for our mortgage on a meager military salary. And we couldn’t sell it because it had lost 1/4 of its value basically months after we bought it. It still hasn’t regained much of that lost value.

Now, we probably could have taken the loss (i.e., owing the bank a 1/4 million dollars for nothing to show), but frankly, that, compounded with living in the middle of nowhere in tiny backcountry communities, did not seem like a bright light at the end of the tunnel, especially for my young family.

So in November of 2023, I turned down my offer to become a military pilot. And poof, my dream was gone.

I spent the next year working my regular day job. I also worked on side projects, with the hope that one of them would turn into a full-time job. That hasn’t happened yet.

I was a little blindsided and refused to see it coming on stronger and stronger, but sure enough, I was getting really depressed and angry at myself, which culminated in some really bad moments a year after turning my offer down, in the fall of 2024.

“How could I be so stupid?”, “I messed up everything”, “I am a loser”. All great thoughts. I was now back into the deep hell-hole of depression and self-hatred.

I picked back up the Feeling Good Handbook from Dr. David Burns; it had significantly brought down my depression years before. For those not familiar with Dr. Burns, he’s one of the early clinicians who worked on CBT alongside Dr. Aaron Beck.

I bought his new book, Feeling Great, which, frankly, is fantastic. He adds a new dimension to this version of CBT by dealing with patient resistance to treatment. I have always been characterized as a wall by therapists, one of them even calling me the most repressed and stonewalled patient they had met.

Slight detour. I had always been curious about psychedelics. I had been given the opportunity twice in the past to try LSD and turned both opportunities down, thinking it was some sort of hard drug. But I knew it wasn’t true. I had since read more, and my research indicated it could be very potent and helpful for depressed patients. I took my chances and started tripping a few times a week.

After talking to a lot of people about it, it seems like it doesn’t work for everyone, but hell, after my first trip, it was like I had lifted my dark, gloomy glasses and felt the first bit of hope and joy I had felt in a while. It was a breath of fresh air.

I continued experimenting. It can be tricky to evaluate how much active ingredient you take as it depends on the strength of your mushrooms. But for an average strength like Golden Teacher, I tested 3-15g and found the most therapeutic to be 4-7g. I must say that on 15g, it was mostly a lot of mania, and I would absolutely not recommend it.

Anyways, while I was tripping on the regular, I worked with a CBT+ therapist for a few months… and it was the first time I completely stepped out of my depression. Taking the Burns depression scale, I had lived most of my life above 90 (it’s out of a 100, and at 100 you should probably be admitted for severe suicide risk…), and now hanging out in the 0-10 range, which is where most normal people are, it felt like a new mind-blowing destination I had arrived at, and it didn’t seem to fade away.

These days, 8 months later, it mostly blows my mind that I lived depressed for so long and entertained killing myself far too many times. It’s a really miserable place to be at, and an important thing to remember is that there is always a way out, even if your brain is telling you there’s nothing to do, in which case I guarantee you it’s lying.

One small parenthesis about psilocybin-assisted therapy, which I guess is what I organized with my therapist. It’s a pretty hard drug to abuse. Personally, every trip is a mix of bad and good. It doesn’t make you want to do it every day. If you’re afraid of a bad trip, you probably shouldn’t try it, because it will probably happen. It’s always a mixed bag. And I personally hate the end of trips, near the 3-4 hour mark, when you come down from it.

Anyways, it is overall NOT a pleasant and easy experience, more of a challenging and growth-focused experience, if that makes any sense. But that’s just my opinion. These days, I usually reach back to it when I’m stuck in some mental health impasse, and staying in my shit sounds worse than going on a mind trip, which usually dislodges me and allows me to process better the following days.

By the end of 2024, I was feeling fantastic. Sure, my fighter pilot dream was squashed, I wasn’t where I wanted to be professionally, but I was feeling a joy to be alive that I hadn’t felt in a long time.

I had finished my therapy by then, and I was doing less and less psychedelic trips. These days I mostly do one every few months or so.

Sure, every once in a while I feel familiar thinking patterns of my past depressed life, but armed with CBT techniques I acquired through hundreds of hours of CBT homework, it doesn’t last more than a few hours, or at worst a few days.

The important part is that on the Burns Depression scale, I’ve been at 0-10 for the last 8 months.

Now we’re coming to why I am studying for the MCAT.

In short, CBT+ and psilocybin blew my mind. I thought being depressed and sometimes suicidal was just who I was, but it was all bullshit. My healing process opened my mind to the fantastic world of therapy and the use of science to better the human mind. I was hooked on learning more psychedelic research, and it seemed to be mostly psychiatrists doing it.

Now, I don’t know that I want to be a psychiatrist, and frankly, the more I learn about the field of medicine, the more fascinated I am by the possibilities it opens.

Maybe it’s my ADD talking, but what attracted me to a life of flying fighter jets was the risks it brought: you’re flying your own machine, you’ve got skin in the game, and if you mess up, you just might kill yourself, all the while people expect you to perform at a high level. You matter.

For some reason, many people are attracted to that. I love having to perform with skin in the game at my absolute best, while under pressure. And I had no idea where I could find that outside of the active duty military life. Certainly not as a software engineer, thickening my butt calluses from sitting all day, and working out my forearm tendons typing far too much.

But it seems like medicine can offer that. It makes you useful. And if shit hits the fan, things can go wrong quickly, and you’re called to do your best. And you’re helping people, which sounds incredibly rewarding.

Now, maybe my idea of practicing medicine is completely off. But what do I care. If I learned anything from the military pilot selection process, it is to not stress about what could be, and to instead focus on what I can do right now.

I’m very far away from doing well on the MCAT. So let’s focus on that.

Because I at first dropped out of university in the middle of my engineering program and was a mediocre student, only to return nearly a decade later, my GPA is not great, even if I was a top student that second time.

So for now, I focus on learning my MCAT Anki decks, using existing ones and creating my own as I painfully make my way through my second-hand MCAT Kaplan review books.

I would estimate I still have at least 1.5 years to go until I attempt the MCAT. It’s a priority, but I also work full-time, raise my daughter, and work on a few side projects that hopefully could help support my family through med school, as it is a big financial hit and I must plan with my wife how we would support our family with one less salary.

I may not be where I want to be in life professionally, but I am no longer depressed, and I am working towards what I hope will be a more interesting career. There’s a long way to go—a very long way. But as the saying goes, we only live once, so why not make it interesting and raise the stakes?

mental-health

Fighter pilots, Depression, CBT, Psychedelics and the MCAT.