From Psychiatrist to Writer and Furniture Restoration
Interview with Dr. Ryan Fightmaster from USA.
Quick facts about Dr. Ryan Fightmaster:
🌎 Country: USA
🎓 Degree: MD, The University of Oklahoma. Graduated in 2022 from psychiatry residency at The University of California, Irvine.
đź’Ľ Current Job Role: Writer and Furniture Restoration Professional
đź’° Gross income: Roughly $50,000 per year
🎨 Hobbies: Surfing, Running, Fishing, and Coffee
📗 Favourite Books: The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham and The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield
🎬 Favourite Movies: Rounders, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Hot Tub Time Machine
Hello! Could you introduce yourself and describe your current professional role?
I’m Ryan Fightmaster, born and raised in Oklahoma, a state at the heart of the United States. I love adventure… and I love my family. As I’ll talk about, those two motivations were often in conflict on my path through medicine.
I earned an undergraduate business degree in entrepreneurship from The University of Oklahoma, worked two years at a non-profit as a health teacher, then in 2014, I started medical school at The University of Oklahoma. With hindsight, I can say truthfully that I never wanted to go to medical school, but there was an ever-present expectation from my parents that I attend medical school. As an only child, living outside that expectation was a task I couldn’t yet accomplish when I started medical school. I thought it was possible to sacrifice my needs–at twenty-four years old, what I really wanted was to move to the mountains and ride my mountain bike while I kept teaching–and still be happy. My plan worked for the first few years, mainly because I love to learn, and there was time in the evenings to keep up with my passions.. Studying for Step 1 was a competitive challenge, one which I enjoyed, but as the patient-care demands of third year increased, I started losing my sense of self and joy. By winter of third year, I was depressed. The guy I remembered, who loved teaching and riding the bike, was gone. When I chose psychiatry as my specialty, I rationalized that it was because psychiatry offered a chance to explore mindfulness and integrative medicine, pursuits I’d long been intrigued by, but in the six years since that decision, I’ve understood my real motivation: I was trying to figure out what had happened to my life! I was losing my sense of self and unconsciously (or preconsciously in Freudian terms), I knew psychiatry was my best shot at solving (or at least understanding) my medicine predicament and why I couldn’t seem to leave something I never wanted to do.
Away from my home and family for the first time, I went to psychiatry residency at The University of California, Irvine in Orange County. It was a daunting four years. I’ve written about that segment of my journey extensively on my website (FightmasterMD.com) and even wrote a book full of my lessons learned. I could’ve quit at any point, but something inside me knew I needed to finish. For me, becoming a psychiatrist was incredibly necessary in understanding not only why I’d gone to medical school (that’s a long story of love and enmeshment and co-dependency that can’t be told succinctly here) but also in preparing me to go live the life that was in my heart. Starting my own therapy was the single most important decision on my journey. By fourth year of residency, while I still practicing psychiatry, I started sensing I could figure it out. That maybe, after all of this, I could figure out a way to be myself. For that entire year, I thought about alternative careers, researched consulting opportunities, and began investing my savings into real estate as a means of passive income for the future. Still though, I was trying to find the perfect solution out of medicine, the ideal job that would match medicine’s salary, security, and social esteem, and I couldn’t find it by the time I graduated. After graduation in 2022, I accepted a part-time outpatient job where I saw patients for twenty hours per week, made $200,000 yearly, and had the opportunity to use my spare time to build my true escape from medicine.
Four months after graduating, days after earning my board-certification, I quit that perfect part-time job. I was profoundly depressed. I had this aching sense that I was missing what I was really supposed to do with my life.
And even though I had this part-time job that allowed me the time to build out my escape, I wasn’t making progress.
As Carl Jung says, “The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one’s whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.”
Thankfully, my wife (who was familiar with my ongoing ambivalence toward medicine) trusted that my exit from medicine was the best thing for me and us.
So, I quit. I took the leap of faith. Ultimately, with no plan! I had $1500 per month in passive income from my years of real estate investments. That was it. Our rent was over $4000 per month. It was very scary with many sleepless nights… but it was also the most alive I’d ever felt. I was back in the game.
18 months later, I write for my website Fightmastermd.com, where I offer support to anyone wanting to build a life they love. So far, I’ve published one book. I also own a furniture company, where I repair, restore, reclaim, and refinish older furniture FightFurniture.com. Furniture has developed incrementally into a sustainable business that started two weeks after I quit, when I noticed an abandoned table along a street in our neighborhood that needed fixing up. After painting it, I sold that table for $60. Since, I’ve sold a hundred other pieces.
Presently, I make a fraction of what I used to make in the hospital. Yet, I’m myself and hopefully a better person to be around. In the future, I trust that will add up to something that allows me to pay my loans back! (I’ve been making all of my payments.) Throughout that first year, we relied heavily on my wife’s salary. We learned how to budget, save, and go without. This opportunity would not have been possible without my wife’s sacrifice. There have been many struggles and dozens of dark moments, but in the long run, I trust it’s the decision that will lead to the growth of what we want: happiness.
What inspired you to shift away from traditional clinical practice to your current role?
Necessity.
I’d tried for eight years to make medicine work for me, and for periods, I really enjoyed it. Patient care, particularly therapy, was incredibly rewarding. But I didn’t love my job, and I couldn’t ignore a growing sense of regret that I was missing a chance to discover who I was. And as I practiced medicine, it required that I invest energy into my patients’ healing, and I wasn’t getting energy back because I never loved it. I was the definition of physician burnout. That negatively impacted my relationships with my wife, family, and friends. It was a pattern that hadn’t changed in eight years, and I couldn’t afford to lose those relationships, especially for a career I didn’t love.
Which skills did you need to acquire to succeed in your current role?
As a medical student and resident, I was addicted to positive feedback. The next test result was always around the next corner, ready to bolster my self-esteem. If a patient told me I was the best doctor since Hippocrates, it made me feel worthwhile. If attendings complimented my work ethic, I felt I was worth something. My self-esteem was constantly buoyed by my successes.
I have no such assurances now!
Learning to toil away in obscurity, where I’m lucky if ten people read anything that I write and my furniture often won’t sell for months, has been brutal. But good for me. Learning to find fulfilment inside the love of my daily work, instead of the outside approval of others, has been the most rewarding aspect of leaving medicine. To own these businesses, I have had to surrender reliance on external results.
And to be able to leave a lucrative career, I’ve had to learn how to tolerate the lack of acceptance by my friends and family. Many people I know do not approve of my decision. Some of my relationships haven’t been the same since I left medicine. But most of them have grown stronger since then. And at the end of the day, I have my own personal integrity again, and I trust that that feeling is worth keeping, instead of sacrificing it again for the acceptance of the tribe.
Obviously, I’ve had to learn how to write and restore furniture. I’ve read dozens of books about writing and watched hundreds of YouTube videos on furniture, along with cultivating relationships with mentors in writing and furniture, but most of my growth in those areas has been from the daily struggle. With writing and furniture, I try my best every day, often come up short of my expectations, learn whatever I can from the day’s lessons, and get back at it the next day. Because I feel so much more like myself than I used to, I trust that’s enough right now.
Which resources did you find most helpful for developing these skills and during your transition?
I knew one person who had previously left medicine. Knowing he had left and was now happy, was an important model. While in residency, I started seeing a therapist. Those three years of therapy were instrumental in learning to trust myself. Toward the end of residency, I hired a life coach too! He happened to be that same person I knew who had left medicine. I needed a tremendous amount of help to go get my life back.
The most challenging step to overcome in leaving medicine was this: no longer needing to have it all figured out before I left.
I’m an advocate for planning. I do not recommend taking the leap of faith blindly. At the same time though, I had no conception that I’d be a writer and furniture restoration specialist at the time I quit. Those answers only came after the leap of faith. For me, there wasn’t another way.
Can you describe a typical day in your current role?
I wake up at 7 a.m., then stretch, read, and drink coffee until 8. By 8:30, I’m working on writing projects or conducting research for those projects. One or two days of the week I create social media content in the mornings too. By 12:30, I either go to the gym to lift weights, do yoga, or go for a run. I eat lunch from 1:30-2:00. From 2:00 PM to 6:30PM, I do whatever’s required for my furniture company. Sometimes I’m sourcing furniture for future projects at local inventory sources. Other days I’m exclusively sanding, staining, sealing, and painting ongoing projects. Sometimes I’m networking in the community for future leads for commissioned work, which is finally starting to materialize.
I try–emphasis here on try–to deemphasize the importance of email and social media until the middle or later part of the day. In the mornings, I work on the most important creative tasks. In my opinion, email and social media can always wait. They always drain critical energy. I know people who feel differently, but this is what works for me. I do not enjoy social media or email.
In the evenings, I love cooking dinner with my wife and walking around our neighborhood. Every other Thursday, I meet with a men’s group to try out new beer around Asheville. My wife and I are thinking of joining a trail running club. We just got a cat. That’s about it!
What were some of the challenges you faced during your transition, and how did you address them?
Initially, the biggest test was in comparison. I compared everything to medicine. Not just in salary but also in success and acceptance. As I found out quickly, careers that provide high-earning potential, job security, and social status don’t grow on trees! And if I did happen to locate another one of those careers, there was no guarantee I’d be happy and fulfilled. I’d already lived that existence.
When I stopped searching for a comparable replacement for medicine and humbly worked at the crafts of writing and furniture, momentum started building. I got hired for commissioned work. Then, I got hired again. I finished my first book. My newsletter list grew. But all of those developments were tediously slow.
My colleagues have been astonishingly supportive. With my closest friends in the field, I don’t think our relationship has changed much. I’m travelling to see my classmates next month in California and couldn’t be more excited. I still join our quarterly journal clubs by Zoom. In terms of my family, there was definitely some disappointment. Their disapproval was hard to process but also necessary. I knew I was doing the right thing for myself. Ultimately, I knew I couldn’t practice medicine anymore and be okay. In the year and half since I left, I feel my family relationships have grown stronger and more honest. Nobody talks about it at all now. My friends never ask about it either. Life goes on, and people have their own problems to deal with. We’re not as important as we physicians think we are!
Do you apply any of your clinical skills in your current position? If not, do you keep your clinical knowledge up-to-date?
Every single day. As I encounter a problem inside business operations or during a customer interaction, I immediately think of a clinical situation where I dealt with something similar. You can take the man out of psychiatry, but you can’t take the psychiatry out of the man! I know that going to medical school, to then become a psychiatrist, was the best thing that could’ve happened to me. I rely on that past experience heavily.. Sure, I’m not choosing between risperidone and olanzapine for the acute management of mania in the emergency department, but I work with people all day and try to be authentic to who I am. I can’t imagine a day in the future where having been a psychiatrist doesn’t help me.
I haven’t kept up with the psychiatry journals or any other resources. I still read about psychoanalysis and have recently delved into Self Psychology more than I could during residency, for no reason other than I find it interesting. My wife makes me watch psychiatric thriller television shows on Netflix too, which I always find entertaining, if not somewhat insulting to my training.
For someone interested in pursuing a path similar to yours, what steps would you recommend they take?
Do not wait for your magical escape from medicine.
If you want to do something else with your life, begin where you’re at. Remember, most people are unhappy with their jobs and their life. At least you have a six-figure job to help you start the next chapter of your life.
I knew during my last year of residency that I wasn’t going to practice medicine forever. I found success stories. I started reading about careers I was interested in outside of medicine. I got a life coach who encouraged me to dream about a life where I invested my time into a job that was personally meaningful. I journaled every single day about what that life could look like.
Tangibly, the outcomes of those efforts have been unclear. But internally, it galvanized an internal sense of readiness, where I started to believe that when the time did come for me to leave, I’d be ready. Do anything that feels like it might help you be ready for that moment when it comes.
What are your long-term career plans?
Right now, I’m focused on getting better at writing and furniture. That’s it.
For years, I used to keep dream boards with my one year, five year, and ten year goals. Now, I really just want to live a purposeful and personally meaningful life. I just want to be happy. I want my wife and I to keep building our family, rooted in the joy of our daily work. I want to live in a community where we enjoy what we do and have vital relationships. I want to make enough money to support whatever dreams of ours do appear. Ultimately, I don’t control if I’ll end up publishing a bunch of books and running a million-dollar furniture operation. I control what I can do next, today. If there comes another big fork in the road where I need to choose a different path for work, I hope I’ll be ready to make the right decision.
What advice would you give to someone considering leaving traditional clinical practice to pursue an alternative career path?
If you’ve been trying to make medicine (or any other career) work for a really long time, a recent promotion, a different city, and an alternative employer do not guarantee anything.
Think about you really love. What really makes you feel alive. Some jobs don’t make you sacrifice that aliveness. Some jobs even provide that aliveness. While I was in medicine, it felt like I had to sacrifice that aliveness just to survive every day. Some of my colleagues have found a nice work-life balance, where they don’t necessarily love their jobs but their job doesn’t destroy their aliveness outside of work. I couldn’t find that balance in medicine. Nor did I get aliveness back from medicine.
A great start is being honest with yourself. But if that’s too scary, it’s okay. When you’re ready, you’ll be ready. It took four years of medical school and four more years of psychiatry residency before I was truly “ready”.
Ultimately, we all deserve to be happy. Nobody has to be a doctor. There are a lot of people who really want to be doctors who would be happy to take our places.
Where can people find you?
Websites: https://fightmastermd.com/ and https://fightfurniture.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanfightmaster/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FightmasterMD
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fight_the_md/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEccYnOllS_gIJFQ7QCIkrw
