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?
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