This is the Moth Radio Hour.
I'm Meg Bowles and I'll be your host this time.
Expectations.
We set them, manage them, and try to live up to them.
Sometimes our expectations of what will happen next are spot on, and other times we miss the mark.
All of the stories in this hour deal with the goals we set for ourselves and how we hope things might unfold.
Our first story comes from Benji Waterhouse.
If you've ever been to a mainstage event, you'll know that we bring people to the stage by sharing their answer to a question that we pose to all the storytellers.
It's an icebreaker that introduces us to the teller as they make their way to the stage.
So, borrowing from that, when I asked Benji, when was a time your expectations did not meet up with reality?
He said, when I was working as a doctor for the National Health Service and realized it was nothing like the TV show Scrubs.
Live from the Union Chapel in London, here's Binge Waterhouse.
I remember when I started at medical school, I was sitting in a great old lecture theatre wearing a stiff white coat, and our plummy dean was saying to us, your main job as future doctors is to keep your patients alive.
Into my fresh notebook I wrote keep patients alive and then I underlined it.
By the end of the six years, though, I realized that I was less interested in the body and more into the mind.
And so I hung up my now stained lab coat and specialized in psychiatry.
I now know that people are quite confused about the difference between a psychiatrist, a psychologist and a psychic.
So just to quickly explain, psychiatrists are medical doctors who usually specialize in more serious mental illnesses, things like schizophrenia, and can prescribe medications.
And boy, do we.
We also have the power to kind of detain or section people, which is like a strange superpower that allows us to lock a person up in a psychiatric hospital against their will and even force them to take medication with, without breaking the terms of the Geneva Convention.