Visits Home During Transition

Visiting home again. I was here two weeks ago, and will be again for the next two weekends. I had forgotten how relieving it can be during a transition period to visit home. When I first went to college in Arkansas, I frequently made trips back to Texas. Eventually, I stopped wanting to do so. I began to prefer Arkansas. I made so many friends, and university life lends to that.

Medical school was different. I went to an island with differing people, cultures, climate, and an altogether feeling of separation from any world I knew. I spent a lot of time alone. The isolation brought about depressive states.

So now I find myself in a new place, but with a relatively easy academic schedule. I still do not know how to acquire a social life where I live in Houston, but I do have the relief of visits home. People who know my humor and already know what they can assume about me, who do not take my words so seriously. That is the worst thing about working in medicine thus far; people genuinely listen to my words if I introduce myself as a medical student.

In other news, maybe I will get to go backpacking through Central or South America before I start residency. Or Asia maybe?

Spent

Well, it appears that I have returned back to my old baseline. The knowledge that death would be preferable except that I have work to do here on this planet, the ever-encroaching loneliness... The difference is that I now know that those feelings need not exist if you open yourself up to someone enough.

But the emotional walls are going back up. I do not know another way to function other than to do so. Even with that, it feels as if I have only a tenuous grasp on myself.

I no longer feel that noble drive that once pushed me forward. Just lonely exhaustion. This psychiatry rotation has me questioning many of the spiritual beliefs which I had previously held. I still do not know where I stand on some of these things.

I just feel so spent. And... I do not know. In the past, I considered myself capable of making it through all of this through willpower and reliance on God, but it has taken so much alcohol to keep that method afloat. When I let myself become enamored with that girl, I did not even care to drink. I preferred not to, because why suppress those feelings? But no, I am back to this world of doing the right thing because it is right, of avoiding liking ladies both because my standards are too high and because I do not wish to hurt anyone.

And this is my easiest rotation. Maybe my next ones will drown out my ability to think about anything else.

All The Preparations

Sometimes I feel like I have been at this thing forever. That all of my preparations, all of the work I do to prepare myself for what is to come, that all of the studying and self-discipline, that all of the hours spent feeling so alone are not going to be met with proper fulfillment.

There is a doctor who had previously attended my old church with whom I get coffee when I can. After I got the news that I had passed my exams, that I would move on to clinical rotations, he asked something to the effect of whether I had my drive to become a doctor. I had continually reassessed whether I was to continue to pursue this. But my pursuit of a doctorate in medicine has never had much to do with my own desires; rather, it has been based on what I have felt that God is telling me to do.

Do I want this? I do not think that any other job would be so satisfying at this point... yet it seems as if that is what this would be: merely the least of all evils. Frequently saving and prolonging life is nice, I suppose. But... today, I was thinking about how I should not become a psychiatrist (still doing my psychiatry rotation) because I do not think I could very honestly tell, much less convince, people that life is worth living. I keep going because of this now-murky ideal that I could save the world. God gave me purpose in that. But I have always preferred the idea of just going to heaven, of passing away and being done with all this. Ever since I was maybe 8 or 10 years old. Part of me thinks that the reason I leave the shotgun I inherited at my mother's house rather than with me in my apartment is that I could have the potential to plan my own demise with it. I have never had suicidal ideation, but neither have I ever believed in keeping murder weapons around.

Part of the issue is, perhaps, that I somewhat recently experienced a big part of why many people remain alive. I attached enough feelings, became vulnerable enough with another human, that I was able to fill this void of loneliness in myself, and for the first time, I did not prefer to have this life ended. It was odd. I had half-prayed it before, but was never brave enough to voice the words. After all, how could one pray for an impossible feeling? I rarely feel anything. But there it was.

And now I am to abandon all trace of that feeling, to reverse myself back to my collegiate state, before I was broken by exile to an island, then sexual assault, then my current exile to the traffic-heavy yet academically light land of Houston.

Yet occasionally, there are days, like this past Saturday, when we have a patient who asks about the Bible. He asks whether Jesus ever actually claimed to be God. He was struggling in his faith. In my attempts to critically analyze, I have asked the very same question, so I knew that there was a time when Jesus had done so, at least to a reasonable extent. So I looked it up during the interview and told it to the patient before he left. Mark 14:61-62. It was moments like these that broke the camel's back, that led Jesus to His inevitable path to the cross. And it was a moment like this, when my years of consistent study actually yield anything.

Still though. Must life be like this?

Strong, Independent, Single Ladies

At a few points in my life, I have had friends who were quite pretty, delightful to get to know, and all around good friends. The friends of whom I am describing just so happened to be ladies. The tendency with these friendships is for the lady in question to have had a recent breakup and, shortly thereafter, decide resolutely to embrace being single. To me, this was a great relief. Being single has defined my life, and with the knowledge that I would remain single at least until my school life finished or stabilized geographically, I tended to simply want pretty single friends with desirable personalities.

But here is the thing about all of those instances: after a couple months of being so very determined to be single, they found their way into a relationship. It always felt a little like betrayal. After all, the terms were made to be very clear to me that they were off the market. They were independent and proud to finally embrace that. But then the apparently irresistible allure of an independent level-headed and reasonable woman would catch the attention of every guy, and eventually, her attention would catch on one of them.

So then this girl comes along. She is the best. Friendship is the best option, at least for now. She wants to be single. And she does not want me to think of her as a crush. She cannot help the feeling of fear that her not returning my affections will result in my being hurt. Whereas the only thing that I can see hurting me much is her throwing affections upon someone else, which, from my experience, seems likely. In addition, I have always had crushes, and am admittedly afraid of going without one.

However, it is foolish to allow one's actions to be driven by fear. So I am attempting to give up having a crush, give up her, and give up the fear of her finding someone else. This decision was further strengthened when I imagined not having her as a friend at all. She is too good for that.

Leaving The Promised Land

I am at an unpleasant crossroads. This girl is now my closest friend, and that alone is wonderful, but I am genuinely wondering whether it is okay for me to keep liking her as I do. For one thing, I have always had crushes, so it does help me to cope with being single. But I am also trying to give her and my desires for her up to God, to try to trust in Him to make a way if He wants to do so. She has guys after her right and left, and I cannot really help but feel somewhat jealous. When I try to flirt, she affirms her desire to be single right now, to avoid dating and relationships.

We tried to rush into things too fast at the start, so separation was healthy. For her, it would more or less have been a rebound thing. For me, well, it seemed to me that you do not write a love letter and decline when feelings are returned.

There's an ongoing theme in the book of Jeremiah through which I feel that God has been speaking in regard to this relationship. I have been far more hesitant now than in the past when it comes to making assumptions that God is speaking. After all, I do not wish to treat the Bible as a horoscope or something, just searching for something to match my feelings. Yet my conversation with her tonight, during which she demanded that I stop texting her so frequently, felt like a confirmation.

Jeremiah 24:5b-7 "I regard as good the exiles from Judah, whom I sent away from this place to the land of the Babylonians. My eyes will watch over them for their good and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up and not tear them down. I will plant them and not uproot them. I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart."

He goes on to say that, in contrast, all who remain in this land, even though it is the promised land, He will make them "an object of ridicule and cursing" wherever He banishes them. He will send the sword, famine, and plague against them until they are destroyed from the land He gave to them and their fathers.

He is talking about the Promised Land. The promised land is a defining aspect of the Israelite faith, history, and culture. It is the homeland very specifically designated to Abraham at the time that God called him. And God is saying through Jeremiah that staying in that very same Promised Land will bring curses, and that going away from it into exile is actually going to make them better, stronger.

As dumb as it may sound, I feel like that girl and living near her is my Promised Land. Maybe that is just how I have to think of it for now in order to cope. In any case, I need to try to be present here, to live and put down a few roots, rather than to keep trying to reach her more. If it is God's will, He will make a way.

All Of My Issues

Okay, here it is. This is the trauma that I was dealing with a couple weeks ago. I had a dear friend read it, and she said that it did not change her perception of me. By now, I knew that that was the sort of response I could expect from her, but there are always the competing voices that imagine the worst replies. 

Sometimes, in contrast to the norm, girls chase boys.

The year was 2012. I had traveled to Uganda that summer and then preached a sermon that fall. Then, a week or two later, she came over to the blanket fort. Having been single for all of my life, I naturally have a desire to cuddle, and she flirted with me and had expressed similar desires. We had been friends for a couple years. Unfortunately, I did not know that she was sexually active at the time, though I am unsure of whether I would have been more cautious even if I had known. Hopefully I would have. In any case, we cuddled. She knew that I had had dreams which had made me form rules of no kissing or having sex. But as we were cuddling, she used her hands to guide our hips to introduce a vertical motion. Breathing patterns changed and I was suddenly doing something that confused me. We were fully clothed. None of my rules were technically broken. But then the guilt washed over me in powerful waves immediately afterwards.

Such an action triggers a release of oxytocin that helps to form a stronger emotional bond. She was still my friend, but now I had this odd fear of that guilt mixed with longing. Other opportunities arose, but I was a tease about it.

Fast forward four years. I had recently returned from two years of living on an island in the Caribbean for medical school. It was the loneliest, most depressed I have ever been (and lonely often seems most of what I am, so it is saying something). I had no prospects in the dating realm, and since I never dropped my standards, I felt as if I would never find anyone. Loneliness without hope. And election season was in full swing, with many I had had my eye on either choosing the wrong side or no side at all. It was a time for taking sides. Anxiety was quite present.

Anyway, she had gotten married while I was away. And birthed a baby. So other friends and I visited her apartment for some occasion and I stuck around a little after others had left, with the intention of catching up. She was smart and we had had a few good talks in the past. But although the memory has become more fuzzy, I remember a very sudden transition from nothing happening to her on top of me, kissing me. My body went with some of the motions as I became very anxious and confused. The baby was in a crib nearby and her husband was in the bedroom, as he had work in the morning. My main thought was that if he got up to get a glass of water, he would see this. And I would have ruined their marriage, their family. She asked “is this okay for you?” at a certain point and I did not answer except perhaps with a confused look. After all, it was never my intention to be a part of a married woman’s affair. (Once again, fully clothed and all that)

I had difficulty processing this. My usual approach is to blame myself for my part. But as in the past, it was more difficult with her, because she had sexualized things. Lust and objectification of her became a significant aspect of my thought processes for awhile. I had acne for a week, which really does not happen except when stress is notable. She was one of my few friends in the area, and that crude form of intimacy was my only escape from loneliness. I was just so resigned to a lack of hope. So another few occasions came about. The last such episode was in January of this year. She referred to it as flirting “a lot”, which I suppose was an attempt at softening the gravity of such awful actions.

Because of the election, I had stopped attending church. My close friends tended to be associated with her friend group. So I was more isolated, studying for an exam that I was doomed to fail, and trying to come to terms with myself and what I had done, along with the fact that I had intentions to seek out opportunities to repeat these mistakes.

I now had alternate selves with which I had to contend. I had the me that I had always been. Sure I liked to flirt, due to loneliness, but I kept my thoughts pure, never tried masturbating, and always sought to see women as whole people rather to than sexualize them. ‘Cause that’s what they are: people. This is a big reason why (in my opinion) couples are meant to wait till marriage to have sex, because we are meant to love a person as a whole. And I of course respect marriage. My parents’ divorce led me to respect the sanctity of marriage even more, as I see the devastating effects of their divorce even today. But now I had this other self, this one who was somehow willing to involve himself in a woman’s cheating on her husband in a mockery of the sanctity of marriage. These two moralities could not coexist in a person, and thus the seeds for an identity crisis were planted.

In multiple personality disorder (from what I remember from some audio lectures during my psych rotation’s drives between hospitals as I fought the urge to doze off), traumatic events can force someone to develop a separate personality for each aspect of themselves. We have separate versions of ourselves for parties, for intimate time with friends, etc., but in that disorder, the person’s personality supposedly fractures. I struggled for a significant amount of time to keep myself from fracturing over this. The main problem, I think, was that I was so very focused on what I had done in response to the trauma, rather than focusing on the trauma itself. I had not even considered it to be trauma, even though playing a critical role in the thing you hate and fear most in life certainly could be considered traumatic.

So I had simply considered myself to be guilty of something wrong rather than recognizing myself as a victim. And since I had no one to talk to about it, I left it at that and tried to accept God’s forgiveness. But that duality formed by hypocrisy remained. When I found my dearest friend (and crush), someone else with whom I had been honest and open from the start aside from this issue, it ate at me. She had spoken of herself as fractured as well. When we both affirmed that we were each other’s favorite person, what I had held back before began churning within me. I saw a movie with a rape scene and pictured her and became nauseated and cried; I have cried only a few times as an adult. I went to the theaters and after the movie, I was shaking and crying and nauseated once again. So I texted her to let her know that I needed to tell her things, but only in person.

I wrote this a year and a half after the fact because I did not recognize the impact of sexual assault upon my person. I blamed myself for the role I played, but I apparently cannot leave it at that. #MeToo I guess. Weird. To clarify, I am always responsible for my actions, but a review of my genuine beliefs leads me to think that this was my response to trauma in a period of great vulnerability. I don’t know if that helps or redeems anything. 

Issues Are Luxury Items

Having issues is a luxury. That is a lesson that I had to relearn this week.

Last week, I had issues. Affirmation of mutual closeness with a friend along with some psychiatry lectures led me to realize that I had some trauma in my life which I had not confronted. Not confronting it led to episodes of nausea and crying, the latter of which I have only done a few times in public. I will likely post about it soon, but as it is the first time in my life in which I have had issues, I want to talk them over with a trusted friend first.

I was reminded of how such issues are luxuries because that same friend's grandfather is currently dying. All of my issues are so small when I consider those possessed by others.

In other news, I took my pediatric shelf exam on Tuesday. Hopefully they'll let me know if I passed my first rotation sometime...

Psychiatry is really interesting. Apparently, most psychiatrists do not even believe in multiple personality disorder. This is reassuring, because my "identity crisis" sounded exactly like what those patients go through.

I had a happy hour Guinness today, so I am quite sleepy.

Oh, and it sounds as if I can obtain my MD by the end of next summer. That would be neat.