time has been speeding up recently. i think i may be nearing that age when you start to shock yourself whenever you look in the mirror. i still feel like a kid, and recently have noticed that no one treats me that way anymore. like when i occasionally stand on the back of the cart at safeway and let it glide me past the aisles and notice people looking at me a little strangely. i think of all the grownups i knew as a kid, who seemed so old and mature in their twenties. worst yet, i think of my patients, who -though not technically "mine", yet- still treat me like their doctor, and i wonder what they would do if they saw my clothes scattered on the bathroom floor, or the catastrophic status of my car, or the amount of candy i'm capable of consuming during finals week. and then there are all these marriages around me. and babies. everyone is having babies, and though i used to tell myself, "oh, how nice. it will be fun to do that, too, one day", now there's an occasional "WHEN?!" that creeps into my thoughts.
i think all of those feelings are partially caused by the realization that this med school thing is pretty much going to go by in a flash. it's almost been a year, yet i feel like i started a few days ago. there's only a few more of those days left. and then, not only will i be responsible for people's lives, i'll be trying to get mine sorted out and on some sort of a path. i'll be 31 and i'll have years of residency ahead of me.
in the meantime, i'm overwhelmed and amazed by how much i've learned, and fightened by how much more i will need to know before i can begin to do anything. i am surrounded by books i feel i should master before this quarter ends and engulfed by the creeping feeling that my life cannot continue to be this unbalanced. doctors have told us to get our lives sorted out now because it only gets harder when you graduate, and i hate them for that. i really do want to keep my car maintenanced and hang my clothes back in the closet when i grow up.
for that reason this week, i've started getting 6 hours of sleep every night and watched 'without a trace' yesterday instead of cramming another hour of endocrinology into my head. today, i went to the climbing gym after class, and fought to get past that horrible feeling i get the first time i exercise in months. and then i came home, cleaned while listening to NPR, and curled up on my couch to write this blog. i still have to study immunlogy all evening on a friday night, but at least i'm doing it with a better sense of balance and pace.
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I hope you actually read these comments. I missed you so much I decided to instigate an e-relationship and check out your site, and I have to tell Dulcey to come read your thoughts, as we were talking about this very issue of balance last night (along with how much we missed you and the fact that I almost called you the other day (before getting sucked back into imbalance) because for some reason the phrase "How easy?...Too easy!" came into my head and I wanted to share. I figured you won't curse me for recalling it because it involves scuba diving and relaxation, despite the neurotic Swiss man. Anyway, I also have this feeling that I'm being sucked into an imbalanced, living-for-work lifestyle, which part of me says is necessary for these 2 years, and I want to work hard in order to get somewhere where I'm doing something I believe in, but then the other part of me thinks I'm just buying into a valuation of myself according to my apparent successes, and it won't change when I'm done. I feel that one has to make deliberate decisions about these things, not only in the larger sense of big life decisions, but on an everyday basis. Where do you stop striving and be content? And when I think of us as freshmen in college, I think: how could we have forgotten this?
So anyway, I miss you a lot, and am glad to hear you are reviving yourself with copious amounts of candy, a dose of NPR, and gliding down the grocery aisle...
love, bean
hey bean!
i think you need to start your own blog!!!
just kiddiing. please keep posting comments. love to know that i am not just writing into a void. been thinking about you guys this week, too. maybe it's the hot summer months creeping in and i am comparing my state of mind to the one i had before. haha. how easy?? tooooooo eeeeaaasy!
love it.
anyway. i promise to call in a week when my exams finish rolling over me.
time has been speeding up recently. i think i may be nearing that age when you start to shock yourself whenever you look in the mirror. i still feel like a kid, and recently have noticed that no one treats me that way anymore.
Amen, sister...
For some reason this post remainds me of a Quote from Don DeLillo's Underworld:
"I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions. Did I do this to myself? You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There's a self-conscious space, a sense or formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing."
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