I’ve been thinking a lot about, uhhhhhhhhhh, about, you know,,,,,, about how, ummmm.... I’ve just been thinking. I’ve had a lot of time recently to just think. In some ways, that’s what I’ve been looking for all along, and it’s just what I neeededdededd, and in other ways,,,.... it’s also like that. So, in all of the ways, in many ways, this is an agreeable life that I’ve found. Totally unemployed with nothing in the future. There is nothing happening to me in the future. There are no plans for the future right now. Isn’t that kinda weird? I’ve never been in this position before. There’s always been a school to go back to,,,,, a job that neeeeeeeds doing for my own professional development,t,t,, some kind of something. Some deadline, something. Something!!!! It’s almost always been school. It’s been school the whole time, at least since, uhhh.... since....... since I was four. Before I was four, that’s the last time I had no plans for the future. And at that point, I didn’t even know what plan was. I couldn’t even spell plan. Maybe I’m selling myself short.

Even then, there were things planned for me. They were just outside my awareness. My parents had plans to send me to preschool and then to elementary school. And then ....... it was school the whole time. It was schooool from the day I was four years old crying getting dropped off thinking what could be worse than this, getting left in an unfamiliar environment and mom’s not coming back?

That’s when I discovered computer. It must have been on the first day of preschool when I discovered computer. I had never seen computer before, and there was a game where you could wash firetrucks. I was washing firetrucks when mom came back to pick me up, and I was like.... "no, mom, I wanna keep washing firetrucks." I couldn’t express it at the time, not so succinctly, and I probably said nothing, but she probably saw me looking more at the computer than at her, and she probably..... the message probably came across.

From there, it was schooooool forever. It was preschool——which was everything to me, I loved preschooool——and then there was kindergarten, I would be in the same place for the next welletlwlelve years. I would be in the same building from kindergarten through twelfth grade, always planning for the next year, planning for what came next, planning for a chorus concert, planning forrororororoorororoorooorororor an audition to be in the school musical, planning planning planning,,,, planning to get good grades, studying to get good grades, practicing trumpet so I could be the best, doing stuff...

I was still going on computer, although we didn’t have internet until... there was no internet in my life until I was about, uhhhhhh, about ten or eleven...... when we got a cabin and there was wifi there and we would go there on weekeneds and we would chill and I would spend the whole weekend on the computer and I would plan out the weekends so I could get maximum things done on there. I would be thinking during the week about what I wanted to do on the computer that weekend, and then we would go to camp and we would be inside this log cabin in the woods, where there was paradoxically high speed internet, and I would go on clubpenguin and addinctinggames and weeworld and eventually minecraft, though that wasn’t until I was about 13, when things had gotten more advanced in my consciousness.

It took me a long time to figure out how to punch the trees. I kept clicking over and over, but nothing would happen. I almost gave up. I looked up a tutorial, and I kept looking them up, but nobody was talking about how to punch the treeeees, how to do it exactly; they would all just do it as if it was a given thing, as it if it was the most obvious thing in the world, and I got so frustrated that I decided minenecraft didn’t even seem that fun, that it wasn’t worth it, that I should just give up. Then I saw a paulsoaresjr video where he said that you have to keep the clicker pressed down, you have to click and hold, and then you’re punching, and then the block will break. He changed my life in that one instant. He led me along with just the level of granularity and hand-holdingness that I needed, and then I was hooked for life. And then I was spending all of the weekends on minecraft. I was looking for servers, I was building skyscrapers with 10-year-old girls, I was meeting people. I met a 17-year-old who was really interested in the holocaust, maybe a little too sympathetic toward, uhhhhhhh, the nazis. He was actually really sympathetic toward them, and he built a replica of auschwitz on the server, the server which ended up being my favorite, the one where I met a couple friends for life, one of whom I text every day even now, the other of whom has gotten married and we check in every now and then, and I love them, and they’re family to me now, and we met on minecraft, and it’s all because I waited to see the paulsoaresjr video, and that’s all because I became fascinated with computer on the first day of preschool, and computer kept me safe and made me feel held while my mom was at work while I didn’t know if she’d ever come back or if this was just my life now. I remember feeling that it would’ve been okay if my life was just on computer forever. I loved it so much, and to this day I love it.

Now I’m here....... yeah, oh yeah, the narrative arc, blah blah finished high school went directly to college, college even more planning-intensive than high school, even more about getting good grades, even though I decided going into college that the grades wouldn’t matter, that I was tired of the grind, that I had grinded my whole life to get to this nice fancy college, I had worked hard enough to get the best grades in my class, and it took a lot out of me, just the psycholooogociallallall experience of it was really too much, so I went into college like, "okay, now grades don’t matter, I’m just here to learn and, you know, I’m just here to learn without the pressure of grades. I’ve already made it." That’s what I told myself.

And then I got wrapped up in this group of sophomores in the first science class I ever took. I wanted to major in psychology and political science, no idea what I was going to do with that, but those were the things that interested me the most, and there I was on day one of classes, far away from home but still in the same state, and I was sitting all by my lonesome, one lone node in a big lecture hall, and our professor told us at one point in the lecture to pair up with someone, and this girl next to me was like, "hi can we pair up," and the rest is sort of history.

She was premed, she was a neuroscience major, this was a neuroscience class, she was really nice to me, she was one of my first friends, she was really great, she still is really great, I should text her.... She introduced me to her other sophomore friends, and they were like, "you must be premed, right" and I was like, "haha, no, there’s no way, you couldn’t pay me to become a doctor, that’s the last thing I wanna do." Fast forward to the end of that semester when I’m in an advising appointment trying to figure out if I can salvage my college career and get on the premed track.

"Yes, you can," my advisor said, "but you have to take chemistry this summer or you’re going to fall behind your classmates. And you have to do this this this hits hiths ith sithsih and this, and you also have to get good grades."

Shit, I couldn’t even go one semester without falling back into the trap of infinte grind.......... but so be it. I wanted to be a doctor, apparently, is what I had decided.... I wwwwanted to be a doctorrrrr, apparently. That’s how I got on the path, and then you can imagine how the path to doctordom is just another long series of plannings and plannigns and panaknanln palana pallapna aandn pdldnapl doandkpaldapmdakdnllnalndlnlnlndnadpalpldanfndlanlnfd. Good grades in college. You gotta have the best grades, actually. So I pursued the life of a 4.0 student, and I really went for it, I went hard in the paint, even in these classes that made me want to die.

Intro bio and intro physics both almost destroyed me, they almost destroyed,,,, meeeeeeeee, one of my classmateseses killd heddd himselfffff in my building sophomore year, he was two floors above me and he did it.... he did it in there.... he just did it, and that was while I was in the thick of the premed curriculum, and I was like, "why does life feel like it’s lost all meaning why am I crying so much, it must be from grief, it must be from griefffffffffff...." grief and you’re on a path that you don’t want and didn’t really choose was sort of chosen for you and you went along with it.

Soooooooooooooooo now I don’t want to be led along these paths. I don’t want to be led along at all. I don’t want to go on a path that I have not chosen with my eyes absolutely firmly planted open. I don’t want to be on any more paths that require me to get good grades. I’m tired of good grades I don’t want good grades anymore. In med school I was finally able to fully let go of the good grades because it was pass/fail, but I felt it too strongly and let myself fail three or four or five exams......... and on clinical rotations I allowed myself to phone it ininininnnn. I still showed up every day (most days), I still did the work, I still was a therapeutic presence for my patients, I really did care about them at the end of the day, but I got pretty mid grades throughout med school. I was not a star student anymore, and it felt so goood, but it also felt bad because it’s like, shit, man, you can’t deprogram yourself in one moment from needing and wanting and craving good grades. You can’t just decide one day that you don’t want good grades anymore and expect your whole mind and body to catch up right away. So med school was distressing, I was suicidal for a good chunk of it, during the preclinical time I was anyway, when we were just hitting the books and no patients in sight and no end in sight, either, and taking exams every three weeekskksksss and I was in my first relationship and it was going well except that it wasn’t because it was doomed it was always doomed, and that was the dark time in my life,e,,e,, a very dark night of the soul so to speakekakkkk,,,, and it sort of followed me in lessening amounts for the rest of med schoool, for the entire four years. All four years one dark night, with a lot of nice little flashes of joy and happiness but mainly, with all the planning that needed to be done, with all the executive functioning skills required of me every day,,, it was one long dark night.

dark night But then I graduated and now it’s over. And I’m done being on paths. I’m done being on paths, even though it’s terrifying to think of what I’m going to do otherwise. Except that it’s not terrifying, and it's only terrifying because my mind and body haven’t maybe fully caught up to what my logical brain my intuitive brain already knows, which is that, uhhh, something something life is worth living and you only get one, at least in this formulation of celllslslsss,,, and so you have to choose what you actually want, you can’t just spend your whole life on pathstststststsss ttthhhat seem good and where you'll get good feedback and where, when you’re on them and you tell people you’re on them, the people will go, “wow nice” and have nothing else to say, you’ll have passed their test, you are legitimate, you are coherent to them,,, it’s nice to be on those paths, it’s nice to be getting feedback from the world around you that you’re smart and that you’re capable and you’re noble, it’s nice to get those feedbacks, it's reallyyyyy actually intoxicating, it is koolaid, and you drink it, and it helps you keep going when the path gets hard, it’s really nice, it’s so fun to get good grades.

I remember once I was on an airplane and it was nighttime and there was wifi on the plane and I got a courseworks notification telling me that my grade for my second organic chemistry exam had been submitted, and I tapped the notificiation, feeling that feeling of dread mixed with anticipation and genuine unknownness that comes, and that feeling that your fate is about to be altered one way or another, that this exam actually means everything all of a sudden, and your whole future is riding on it. I opened the notificaiton and saw that I had gottan a 100. And I was like, there’s no way there’s no way there’s no way there’s no way there’s no way there’s no way. And it was the best feeling ever and I still feel proud of that. I compared my grade to others' grades, which was a built-in function on the courseworks website, and saw my little dot so far above the mean, and I was addicted. In that moment I was addicted to the grind, because look what happens when you’re actually in it, look what happens when you can do it, look what happens, junior year of college, look how good you can feel if you just grind if you just do it if you just learn if you just get into it look what can happen!!!!

moderation How am I supposed to not be on a path after this? Not without growing pains, not without a few little weed benders here and there, not without writing, not without friendship, not without the great outdoors, not without ants, not without music....... not without companionship. I have to still be reading I still have to be intellectually stimulating myself and making others do that for me as well, I still have to be stimulated, I still have to, uhhh... I still have to press some of those buttons that have been pressed my entire life..... I still have to press some of them, but I’m also working on pressing other ones and seeing what they do, but I’m really not good at it... I’m really not good at it... yet? It’s a skill I’m working on to do other things and to seek out other experiences that are not tied to any kind of institution or prestigigeegeeeee or grade orrrrrrrrrrrrrr future orientation or anything. It’s really hard but it’s also a blessing and I’m also happy to do it.

I’m not interested in any more paths for the time being. No more certifications. And you’re asking me, "what are you going to do with an MD but no medical license, no ability to prescribe medications or really do any of the things that we think of doctors doing when we think of doctors..." (do you even think of them?)

I’m not sure. The answer is unclear to me, the answer is unclear, and I think that’s... I think that’s a good thing? When I think about my life, when I think about all the paths, and I think about all the planning that’s had to be done, I think that now is when I can finally get back to myself at baseline, I can finally find myself in that state of nature before I was touched by all of this talk of institutions and school and good grades and good careers and making lots of money. iii can go back to before. And what I loved most of all when I was a child, what I loved before I loved anything else, was... computer? No, I’m sure that’s not it. I’m sure it was my mom or something. And the outdoors. I loved being in the woods at the time. But computer... computer has been with me the whole time, too. I’m going to take computer with me. It feels like a good companion. It feels like a good way of, you know, living. It’s still good. I still love computer. I’ll still take it with me. And wherever I go, whatever path calls out to me next, computer will be brought along. I just wish I could find the game where you wash firetrucks.