xxxi
prev.cont.Since ICU week ended, I haven’t been able to motivate myself to move my body or go outside or do anything. It’s too hard. I used up all my energy in the above ground. Do I really have to scrape together more of it to use in the underground? I’m allowed to lean fully into the breaks when they come, right? I’m genuinely asking.
Oh, but the sun is shining through the window and hitting my skin. I can feel my cells making vitamin D in real time. It feels good.
I’m starting to remember why I don’t like winter. It becomes a whole ordeal to go out into the world because it’s always cold and usually dark. You have to layer up. Everything has to be more intentional. The spontaneity goes down, even at an atomic level. Temperature as a proxy for kinetic energy and all that.
Not sure what the point is today. What’s the assignment? Is there one? I’ve forgotten what I’m doing “all this” for. What am I supposed to do now that it’s the weekend? Should I use this pause as an opportunity to quit medicine while I’m ahead? I don’t want to wait until I’m brainwashed into being unable to do anything besides the job. There are other things I want to use my motivation on.
I’ve never really known how to approach “taking breaks.” It’s especially difficult when my advisor tells me I need to start the process of applying to residency so that I can extend my misery in the system that I’ve identified to be the root of all evil in my life, and the lives of everyone else.
I need to stop talking to doctors. I’m slowly being driven insane by the fantasies they spin about control and saviorhood, power and money. Listening to their fantasies inevitably makes me question my resolve to go no further than the weird year. They poison me into thinking that I want the same control and money that they have, that I should be studying more, working harder on my assignments. I hate that I allow myself to internalize their neuroticism, but it’s hard not to when I spend most of my time with them. I know I’m supposed to take refuge in some kind of higher power, but instead I take refuge in the suffering, the fantasies, the people who know not what they do.
What I want more than anything is to run away right now, but what I’ve settled on is running away later. The only thing that keeps me going is the idea of getting out of here as soon as the weird year ends. I don’t know what’s going to happen at that threshold. It feels so powerful, like a sort of death. I know that I won’t be able to prepare for how I’ll feel when I finally cross over, no matter how much I try to anticipate the feeling.
I’ll have to unlearn all this anticipation after the weird year ends. They’re training us to anticipate every possible need of the doctors we follow, and I’d personally rather die. Anticipate something? When the future is so uncertain? Are you crazy?
I’m not willing to suck it up and get used to the culture. Not when the culture is disagreeable to everything I know and believe and feel. Are my knowledge, beliefs, and feelings not enough for me to give it up? What else is is it going to take?
exit