Stuck Between a Rut and a Wild Place

There's just something about staying up until 3am on a weekday. After a year of meticulously keeping a sleep schedule... or not so meticulously... I miss the spontaneity of letting the night flow on until the only sounds left are my heartbeat and the clicks of a keyboard. I miss the death of the world under blackness or moonlight while listening to the wind sing through the darkness behind the thin glass of my windows. Of course I exchanged the midnight hours for the scarlet gold of the morning sun. It's beautiful in it's own way, I tell myself, but something about a morning schedule just doesn't sit right with me.

I've sacrificed a lot to get here, but I tend to regret it. There's this lingering desire to have my cake and eat it too, or to chase my dreams and my other dreams as well. In high school I dabbled in computer science because of it's systemic nature and the possibility of telling stories through games I could learn to design. I also have always wanted to be a writer to continuously practice reflecting the experiences in myself and others. So medicine, while a significant part of my life that bridges my interests, is not all I ever wanted to do. But in the end, choosing is important; otherwise, you get nothing. So, 6:55 AM alarms and morning routines it became.

It isn't all bad. In the end, I can't imagine myself choosing something besides emergency medicine in my future; it's what I feel is my truest, brightest path. I can picture myself reviewing texts off the clock and steeling myself with focus for efficient general procedures and care on the clock. I'm also fearless; when I was younger, an oven fire only served to make me excited to use the fire extinguisher. In the end, the skills I am gathering to care for others deeply interest me, but so does the idea of sporadic shiftwork.

I have decided to not choose, or delay choosing, for as long as possible. There are just too many possibilities, so many pieces of light in myself, that I don't want to give them up. I still deeply enjoy the reflective wonder of writing and stories, even if just for the sake of writing. I also enjoy learning to pronounce endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP for short) and its applications in diagnosing liver, gallbladder, and bile duct pathology. All of these things are so fascinating to me, but also part of how I make sense of the world. To remove all of one or the other would be like attempting a pancreaticoduodenectomy, that is to say, remove and shift around core parts of who I am at a great risk.

References to my gastrointestinal studies aside, medicine takes a lot out of the people who choose it, and I often fear it will steal my identity. I fear I will one day be a boring sad man who does boring sad things. Despite the wonder and thrill of a career in medicine on my horizon, I think this cognition could be derived from a need to consistently embrace all that I am. While emergency medicine is a compromise that will connect me to others, connect me to knowledge, and connect me to the night, I fear that I will lose something far more important and mysterious along the way.

But maybe it isn't so grim. Since starting this mad-dash of gaining knowledge and deliberating over what it means to care for others, I've become more "me" each day. I signed up for an E-sports team briefly last semester and made a lot of new friends in the process, and I am still able to make students laugh and feel comfortable with writing at my tutoring job. Several years ago, I thought I would have been suffering by now in med school, but I made a pretty good life here anyway. So now I believe, if I keep following what I love, I'll eventually end up exactly where I should be.