Now for Something Completely Different

A coworker/friend asked me yesterday "Are you doing ok?"

The answer right now is "Maybe." It's been a strange kind of time. Funny how unexpected life can get and how something you didn't plan for, hell, could never have anticipated, fucks you up just enough to make you struggle some moments and go "What the fuck is wrong with me?"

It's been a kind of rough year for the residency. The recent event aside, which I haven't yet been able to think of in any way besides small flashes of memory and haven't been able to articulate in any appropriate way, there's been a lot. Tumult within the program, site reviews, faculty switches, medical catastrophes which again, I haven't wrapped my mind around just yet.

My mind perseverates on the little pieces though. Walking home today, I felt a thick melancholy around me. For a second, my body stopped and the greatest need was to lie down and cry. But I didn't. Because I can't.

Riding in the car with my family today, my dad told a story about how I had told him that I promised him I would go into medicine and how he had then told me that there was no one that I should promise that to but myself if I wanted it. In that moment, the part of me that is terrible, tells him that that is not true. I did not promise any of this to myself: the endless hours, the misery, the absolute lack of even basic decency I'm often confronted with. It's a revisionist history, one that gets to be written by the victor who gets to look from afar and say "Have I ever steered you wrong? Could you be any happier any other way than you are?"

These are questions I've yet to answer.