Happy Halloween

I wrote an angsty world cloud in June, raining down the pent-up fears, hazy anxiety, and subsurface sadness that came with leaving behind a decade of my life in Nashville.

I had lost the world that I built with D.  I left behind the love of his family who enveloped me as their own daughter. I cut off his love, his support, and his gentle encouragement. I stood pridefully alone in June, done with the wacky, warm community of Nashville martial arts, that loved us and accepted us as ourselves and as a couple. After a final drive up from Nashville, and a difficult week of goodbye with D, I gave up the friends, relationships and places that we built together.

I had willfully and proudly thrown away my student years - and with it, my student friends, who, too, were whisked away in the excitement and fears of their new lives, in new cities, with new jobs. Through that last year in Nashville, we joked away our anxiety through cups after cups of celebratory alcohol. We're so over spending our youth on degrees, we laughed. We're so finished with being the oldest kids on the block, we hooted. We're so done with being the lowest human sign post in the Hospital. Yet, by the end of it all, we knew we were all trying to hold on to our late twenties and early thirties. A decade lost in Nashville, spent with each other and dedicated meticulously to building communities within and without the Hospital that we were pledge to. We were all scared.

I didn't know it, but, my mental well-being, in that last year, was barely hanging on by a thread, thinned by the inevitability of change.

Somewhere along earning the bachelors' in nerd studies, the doctorate of philosophy in who the fuck cares, and the medical degree, I had forgotten what a passion outside of books, test tubes, and sick people, meant. Somewhere deep inside, I felt the emptiness of that loss, stirring ever so muted, through the dull humdrum of my studies in Nashville. In June, when I sat alone in a bedroom that was passed on to me from the last doc in training (now, too, off to a new life elsewhere), the muted hum of lost passion roared, along with all the self pity that accompanied me through my goodbye with Nashville.

It is now Halloween. And I am better. Fortuitously, I interviewed in Cooperstown exactly one year ago. I remember thinking, as I walked through the crisp fallen leaves, that it wouldn't be so bad if I ended up here. The blaze of autumn colors in the hills that surrounded this sleepy town, gave me the first stirrings of passion, that a year ago, I didn't even realized I missed. A year here, I thought, as I ambled past the rustic old cemeteries covered in red and yellow, would give me the solidarity to find myself.

Honestly, that was all romantic bullshit that I wooed myself with during my year of interviews in every corner of the United States.  I didn't even think twice about coming here. In February, as I was making my rank-list of hospitals I wanted to spend a year in before I start my real life of being a radiologist, Cooperstown barely made middle of my list; and only after I got an an encouraging email from the hospital that reminded me that my interview here went well. When the news came that I was coming here, the fear and disappointment of leaving Nashville overwhelmed me several times to surprising tears.

But here I am. Happy. Learning, in the last year of my twenties, that I am still a complex human who continues to be molded and will never be fully mature. I am discovering that I have many passions. Surprised, as always, that motion and physicality makes me happy. Ecstatic that sunlight hitting the trees, the rocks, the peaks and the oceans still gives me the giddiness of a 5 year old. Relieved that despite my youth stained with social anxiety, I have grown comfortable with myself in my twenties, and can pursue and accept new relationships that I now avidly build.

I am exactly where I need to be.