xxvi
prev.cont.I was near tears when I left clinic today. I walked across the parking lot with a weird scowl on my face (I saw my reflection in a car window) and couldn’t figure out why I was feeling so horrible. I still can’t figure it out. Maybe it’s just everything.
As much complaining as I do about the weird year, the days themselves are pretty simple. It’s just laundry, studying, eating, talking, waiting for the empire to collapse…. Haven’t I been doing all those things all along? There’s nothing new under the sun, is there?
The sameness of the days makes wishing them away feel silly. Everything is the same as it’s always been. Nothing is ever really going to change. It’s all going to be the same the whole time.
I don’t know what it would take for things to feel different. Maybe a close brush with death would shake things up. Of course, I don’t wish for that, but it’s just the first thing that comes to mind.
I wonder if I’ll ever be satisfied. Maybe the acknowledgment of the constant sameness of everything could be the boost I need to find satisfaction. As long as nothing’s going to change, why not be satisfied? I doubt that waiting for satisfaction to come is the answer. Is it really possible to be satisfied in the future if I’m not satisfied right now, if it’s always going to be the same, more or less?
The tricky part is that satisfaction isn’t something I can talk myself into, even though I know that I need to be satisfied in order to be satisfied. Even so, upon reflection, I can say that I’m feeling satisfied in this moment. I’m not hungry or bored or tired. I’m not exactly “happy,” but you can’t expect happiness all the time.
I saw my first circumcision today. My job was to distract the baby from the fact that his foreskin was getting sliced off. I dipped a single-use binky in sugar water and put it in his mouth. He sucked on it dutifully, but he became less interested in it after it’d been in his mouth for a while. He became more interested when I tried to pull it out of his mouth. I think he liked having to work for it.
I wonder if I’m like the baby. I’m a bastard child squandering a hundred thousand dollars a day for an education that I hate, sucking on the sugar water binky even though I know I’m getting mutilated. When the weird year starts to pull away, will I want it back? Is post-weird year life going to feel too easy to be satisfying?
I guess I’m not like the baby. I don’t want a binky dipped in sugar water. I don’t want to be distracted from the fact that a stranger is mutilating my genitals; I want the stranger to stop mutilating my genitals.
Sugar water circumcisions, real or metaphorical, feel cruel and unusual. What did the baby do to deserve that kind of punishment? I hate that I was a willing participant in the torment, and I hate our culture for allowing it—encouraging it, really—to happen. Granted, they would’ve done the circumcision with or without me, and I guess it’s nice that I was able to ease some of the baby’s suffering with the sugar water, but that doesn’t make me feel much better about the whole thing.
After the circumcision, I was pretty thrown off. Maybe that’s why I almost broke down in tears in the parking lot. I can’t be caught crying in the parking lot, though, obviously. People will say, “Did you see that med student crying in the parking lot?” and everyone will finally figure out how miserable I am. It’ll no longer be my dirty little secret.
Part of my torment is having doctors tell me all day, explicitly and implicitly, in big and small ways, that I’d be stupid to jump ship. Maybe they’re right. Maybe I’m the delusional one. I’m sabotaging myself from the inside out. My wish for psychosis has already come true.
Psychosis notwithstanding, I know that sugar water circumcisions are fucked up, and I can’t participate in one ever again. My basest values say so, and those are the ones that I’d like to abide by.
exit