This is not a poem

I find myself waking up everyday wondering why I am doing what I am doing with my life. The feeling began to gnaw at me a few months ago. Now it bites me at night and I wake up to find blood all over the sheets.

I used to enjoy cooking. I used to relish the creative process. These days, my ATP is scarce. I'm in Guatemala. I mostly eat out of a deli. I bring the plastic-wrapped food back to my room and gulp down whatever sandwich I've picked. And then I breathe a sigh of relief, because I have avoided social interaction with the friendly Canadians and Koreans who currently share the communal kitchen with me and the hostel owner.

They're sweet, but the itch of what I haven't resolved pulls me upstairs behind a closed door and into a faux-solitude. I half-heartedly and unsystematically respond to emails. I close facebook windows as quickly as I open them. And I procrastinate on filling in the outlines that stare at me from black and white word documents, because I am afraid of what I won't write: a masterpiece.

People told me over the years that most MD/PhD students go through mid-PhD blues. They say it has a lot to do with seeing your med school classmates graduate and leave you behind to your life of fairly unrewarding tedium--you're typically still at the stage where things are not working.

That's not what it is for me. The wiser ones have told me about another struggle: accepting that many of us will just be "good enough." We will not revolutionize our fields, but we will be good-enough researchers. We will not be mind-blowing clinicians, but we will be good-enough doctors. The recognition has been sinking into my bones slowly, but I'm still trying to fight it.

There are dying embers of hope that I try to stoke in the hearth of my heart: embrace imperfection, this uncomfortable feeling of straddling two horses, and maybe you will again be able to craft words as easily as you did when you were ten, and the poetry flowed through your veins.

The child, imagination wild, possibilities endless, barely lifts her quill from the parchment. The twenty-six-year-old is lost in an open space, full of potentials, but confined in her mind, too worried about the future to think freely and scribble and doodle and make a literary mess.

How I miss that freedom.