Balloons

May 11, 2012

Note:  It's difficult to describe the darker, despairing moments that I seem to encounter during my sojourn as a medical student.  This entry comes from a Facebook post I wrote after having finished the last two weeks of final testing that capped my first year of medical school.  Hope, courage, disappointment, despair, the energy to strive on, hopelessness, and confusion.  Handling life under the psychological threat of medical school creates an interesting emotional terrain.  Herein lies a painting of this emotional landscape at a particularly bleak section of trail along my journey.

     It seems med school is a bit like a maze in which the walls are adorned with the points of a thousand needles.  And we students are balloons, floating through the unknown.  Inevitably, I will run into a needle, and I must pick up the pieces... dare to try again.  So I work incredibly hard, and inflate the balloon of my dreams so that it can keep carrying me on.  And at the end of the unknown maze and it's challenges, the professor tells me that my grade doesn't matter--that I'm back to square one--and hands me a test that has so very little to do with the information I've learned this year, assessed in a style to which I am unaccustomed.  And I feel the needle sinking in, and the balloon pops, and I wake up, feeling as if I was willfully led into a dream by those who handed me accolades for my achievements--tricked into thinking that my efforts and my sacrifice had bought me success.  But the trophies are gone, and there's nothing left to show for the pain and the blood I'd paid for them.  Learning is great--but we rank those who learn.  And I have nothing to show for it but the pieces of my broken balloon...

Emergence

       It's a scary thing, not to be polished.  An entry or two ago, I wrote that I was going to try to leave my shoe polish in the closet, the iron on the shelf--to let my thoughts emerge into the world without that starched collar, those shiny black shoes that look so new, without the jacket or the pants.  Without the suit that is above reproach--well, at least marginally defensible against reproach.  How many of us had nightmares about going to school, and then realizing that we were only in our underwear?  That's a bit how I feel about this blog right now, that I'm risking that I'll come to full consciousness in the middle of Thought World in only my underwear.  But the fresh breaths of air, the freedom, the permission to... not... be excellent... that permission is good, I think.  The world becomes a bigger place, and perhaps I become a bit bigger as well--perhaps even big enough to grow out of my terror of being caught in only my underwear.

       It's almost the end of our midterm test week.  Such mixed feelings.  The intensity of pre-test week is something to behold--a physical, mental, and spiritual intensity that is compounded by a neglecting of social connections that is necessary for many of us so as to sustain such intense periods of study.  And so life begins to revolve more and more around academic responsibilities as test week slips onto the boarder of the horizon.  Perhaps you can relate to this looming central reality that seems to swallow the whole of your vision, planning, and thoughts of the future.  In my schedule, these looming realities exist:  realities that loom large--so large that their shadows fall impenetrably black across my life, and seeing beyond them is unimaginable.  Each ounce of my energies for these past three weeks has been carefully weighed by it's investment in preparing me for the trial of Exam Week--the mountain range that has been drawing nearer, inching taller, looming larger, pressing closer as it swallows my field of vision.  And I know I must attempt to cross it.  Soon.  Yet I must not only attempt, but succeed--and succeed in a way as to sustain exceptionality.  And now, the unimaginable has happened, and I am walking down the descending slope of the last craggy peak--the mountain range lies behind me.  I've done it.  I've crossed the Rockies to emerge on the corn fields of Kansas, and I really don't know what to do with myself.  I mean, corn fields can be exciting, I suppose; but it takes a very different mindset to get excited about the flat, dimensionless, mind-numbing similarity--this lack of dynamicity--that surrounds me, here, in Kansas, after the threatening, hostile topography of the Rockies.  What does Dorothy say to Todo when they arrive back in Kansas?

       I thrive on the challenges demanding intensity, and I am thrilled that there are mountains of knowledge to climb, worlds of excellence for which to strive--for if there weren't, I'd be quite bored.  On a large scale, such demand is central to why I find medicine alluring.  On a small scale--the present, daily life in which I live and experience, such as Exam Week--it is where I find a fire inside myself, a determination, energy, an inner smirk that dares the challenge, Try it... try breaking me, defeating me, extinguishing me.  Apparently, this mettle-testing, dominating tendency is a hallmark of my personality, which sees my environment "in terms of struggle and endurance" against which I am testing my ability to survive. (Other hallmarks include packing more steely determination and single-mindedness into life than the other Enneagram types, complimented by a wickedly strong aggressive streak; scary).  Though at times I am intimidated, stressed, fearful, or timid, I love a worthy challenge.  But consistently, as I re-emerge upon life from my crucible, I find that the world has faded--as if I have come forth from the fire and darkness into the sunlight of life--simple, joyful life; but I discover that my eyes are unable to see the colors around me, that the world is white, for the light of possibility shines on everything.  All aspects of life.  And I am adrift.