Thank you anita and Peter for your thoughtful responses and encouragement.  They gave me a fresh perspective to look at things and I feel a little more hopeful.

@anita:

“Many of the people you studied with in medical school..” — I agree that this would realistically be the case. I myself am not sure if I would have been better off had I gone ahead to residency. Looking at it this way did help me feel more at peace with my current situation.

“not to pursue a career as a medical doctor but to look into a career that is less stressful, less demanding” — This definitely sounds like a good idea. I believe that I would need some residency training to be competitive at these jobs, however. Maybe I can gather the courage to power through residency somehow in order to get a foothold at a non-clinical job.

“Accept the loss and waste best you can, expect that there will be more” — Acceptance seems to be a common theme. Some days it is easier and some days it is harder to accept things, and these words helped me toward a mindset of acceptance, at least for now. Thank you so much for your thoughtful words.

@Peter:

“Yet latter in hindsight the realization that it took going through X to get to Y. Its bitter sweet. ” — I thought about this sentence, and I hope for a future where I’ll be able to look back at my current period and understand where this fit into my life story. I feel that I have matured a little as a person in the years I spent out of work; maybe the years have made a difference in my life…

“Miss a step, miss a beat your impulse will be to move faster and catch up. Only it never works because that moment has passed.” — This is a really interesting analogy, and a very thought-provoking one. I guess life is not like school, where there are predetermined goals and you have to catch up to those goals if you fall behind. I have been stuck in that perspective for a long time, and thank you for reminding me of another way of looking at things.

“There is no time travel so the reality is that you can only move from the place you’re in” — I really think what I need to do is accept my situation. I got hung up on the past and that made me feel like nothing was worth changing since it was all ruined anyway. I’ll try to think of what I can actually change and focus on those.