xx
prev.cont.The weird year is never going to end. The days filled with torment are never going to end.
Woe is me. I’m not supposed to be here. I don’t want to learn about dialysis and ventilator flow settings. I don’t want to diagnose someone with Parkinson’s.
It all feels hopeless. Artificial.
The neurologist told me that if he were to take even three weeks away from medicine, he wouldn’t be able to come back to it. He’d get a taste for what life “could” be like, and he couldn't bring himself to return to the grind. A scary thought.
My mentor told me he’d like to teleport me from age 25 to 30. There’s too much struggle in the intervening years, and he doesn’t want to have to watch me go through it. Another scary thought. I’d also like to time travel to a post-weird year future, but the idea that I should fast-forward through half of my 20s feels profoundly sad.
I have to stop feeling sorry for myself. If I’m in a prison, I put myself in here, and I have the key. Say it with me: I don’t feel sorry for me and neither should anybody else. Grow up. All this stressing about assignments and torturing myself with dread is not only pointless but offensive.
Let me repeat that: it’s pointless. I tried to approach today with a good attitude, and I still had a shitty day. It’s time to give up.
How do my classmates do it? Do they hate themselves as much I do? Are we all performing in the theater of imaginary oppression together, telling ourselves and each other that this is a worthy effort, that we’re being really brave, that our suffering is valid?
It doesn’t matter. What matters is jumping through the hoops. The American medical system is asking me to jump, and I will, but I’m not going to ask how high. I’m going put on the most evil expression I can muster, look them in the face, and jump through the hoop brandishing a knife. I’ll do whatever it takes for them to get the memo that telling people to jump through hoops, giving them lead roles in the theater of imaginary oppression, is mentally ill and morally reprehensible.
The only thing that disgusts me more than myself is the institution. I don’t even know which one I’m referring to at this point. My school, medicine, America, who cares. They can all kick rocks.
They expect us to spend the best years of our lives working without pay in a system that is fucked beyond repair. They watch as we endure weird year after weird year, spending our youth behind computers, working toward Sisyphian goals like good grades and high salaries, all while taking baths in our money.
The human psyche was never supposed to go through all this. It wasn’t built to reckon with the fact that it’s sending money to an institution that funds class warfare and gentrification and genocide. There are no lobes of the brain, no appendages, no pre-formed synaptic networks to handle something like that. It’s impossible for the human mind to fully comprehend.
The other day my classmate asked our mentor how we can reconnect our minds to our bodies in times like this. That’s not a normal question to ask. We deserve to live lives in which our minds and bodies are seamlessly, beautifully linked, in which we’re attuned to what our bodyminds need, and we can give it to them freely. Our mentor had no satisfying answer. Something something “wellness is important.”
I can lean on my classmates for support. Nobody understands the abject horror as much as they do. I can lean on my friends and family, too. No matter how far I lean, though, at the end of the day, I have to swallow every instinct that tells me to stop. I have to finish. I have to finish.
When I get through this, I’ll have every reason to cry and laugh and burn everything to the ground. All I have to do is get through it.
I’m biding my time. Let the bided time be fuel for the fire. When I finally escape, maybe I’ll have enough fuel to dump all of it on the theater of imaginary oppression. It’s gone on long enough. The reviews are in: it sucks. Anybody got a match?
exit