post viii - connections

on this bright, beautiful day in norcal today, i’m sitting at my favorite bay area cafe soaking up the sunshine & enjoying my own company.

just 2 or 3 years ago, especially through the pandemic, there was nothing i loved more than my own company. i loved driving up to san francisco on my own, just to walk along land’s end by myself. on some days, i’d pack a book and my laptop to sit at a cute cafe in santa cruz. i’d just spend my days walking around local neighborhoods, sometimes deeply immersed in the buzz around me, sometimes just letting the sensations of the world around me pass by like clouds in the sky.

over the past couple years, i feel that i have lost some of that ease of just…existing.

conceptually, i understand that those years of the pandemic forced us into physical isolation. but honestly, if i’m talking about how i felt within myself, i didn’t feel very isolated at all. my friendships were as strong as ever, i felt connected to a purpose in life, and i felt in tune with myself. of course, this is a very romanticized, unilateral perspective of what was happening during the pandemic - there was much more going on in the universe. but within my own little world, i felt at peace with myself.

by the time the pandemic truly struck in march of 2020, i had created an image of what life would look like - 5, 10, 50 years down the line. i spent the entirety of the pandemic studying for the mcat & applying to medical school. i felt that was my singular purpose, to “take advantage” of this time i had been granted & focus on achieving that goal of mine. i was supposed to go to medical school, establish myself as a brilliant & compassionate physician advocate, find the person i’d spend the rest of my life with in residency, and live my happily ever after.

it’s not a very unusual story, i realize that. in fact, it’s one of the greatest cliches - a woman in her early 20s thinks she has her life all figured out, but to nobody’s surprise, she doesn’t. i understand that might sound resentful through text on a screen - but i don’t mean it that way at all. truly. the fact that my life has not panned out the way i thought it would has been the greatest blessing i could ever have received from the universe. i’ll get back to that point in a bit.

during the pandemic, when i was forced to step away from the constant stimulation of college life, i was forced into learning to enjoy my own company. i thought that because i learned to enjoy my own company, maybe that meant that i loved to be alone. in fact, i thought maybe it meant that i preferred to be alone. so, when it came time to figure out my living situation for medical school, i chose to live by myself. nobody could have ever prepared me for how truly lonely medical school would be.

but here’s the thing - i wasn’t lonely because i was alone. at the time, i was (and still am) in the best relationship that i could ever ask for. i was blessed with absolutely incredible friends in & out of medical school (and i still am). i had the unconditional support of my family (and i still do). i lived alone, and at the time, i thought that’s why i struggled so much with loneliness. but that really wasn’t the problem. it wasn’t loneliness from the outside…it was loneliness from within.

i bring this up because since i left medical school, i’ve been feeling that itch for constant stimulation again. this time, it’s different than it was in college though. i think in college, it was more so that i determined my self-worth and value from how busy & “productive” i was. i needed to be constantly stimulated to feel worthy. i don’t feel that way anymore - i believe i am finding my worth in simply existing & being what i believe to be a good person.

this time around, i think i feel that itch for constant stimulation because i feel disconnected from myself. i’ve lost touch with what makes me truly feel like myself outside of my interactions with & responsibilities to others. i’ve been spending so much time over the past few months constantly surrounded by people, that when i’m left to myself for an amount of time, i don’t know what to do with myself - i seek out company, and if i dont find it, i find myself spiraling & scrambling for some sense of external purpose & stimulation.

i don’t mean to sound ungrateful, and i am blissfully enjoying being surrounded my loved ones, of course. i am eternally grateful for every moment i get to spend with the people i love. the point is that i need to find the balance between the time, love, and space i hold for others, and the time, love, and space i hold for myself.

so today, i forced myself to venture out, find my thoughts, and enjoy my own company. rather than relying on someone else to fill my day & my mind, i am challenging myself to find my own peace, self, and joy again.

a few paragraphs ago, i said i’d come back to my point about the gratitude i feel for my life going in a completely different direction than i’d imagined. a few months ago, when i first decided to leave medical school & was deliberating my future career path, i had reached out to my wonderful grad school advisor for advice on what to do next. as always, we had a wonderful conversation & it renewed my appreciation for such trusted advisors in my life.

i wholeheartedly agree.

it takes a great deal of strength for an individual to leave something they thought they would love & aspire towards forever, and to say it’s not for them anymore - whether it be a career, relationship, religion, belief system, or otherwise. i’d like to emphasize that in my case, it would be naive of me to say that this strength came from entirely within myself - i drew on this strength from my community of loved-ones & well-wishers, and i am eternally grateful to have had these people to help me re-discover myself & what i wanted from life when i felt hopefully lost.

today, i’m living a life i am absolutely in love with. i have been blessed with all the gifts that the universe has to offer - time, health, family, and love. of course, it was terrifying to leave the path that i believed would help me achieve what i thought to be my life-purpose…but it wasn’t until i left that i found the beauties of life again.

i am at a stage of my life now, i think, in which i am finding the balance between relying on myself and relying on others. i’ve lived both extremes - living in a zone of hyperindependence, and living in a zone of hyperdependence. i need to find the right balance in between.

i’ve understood through my journey so far that this balance i’m aiming to achieve is a complex one that will always be in flux. it’s just a line in the sand that i will have to draw, re-draw, and draw again with every wave that comes in & washes it out. but it is a line that i must draw with intention each time - at least until this balance comes more naturally to me. sometimes i’ll have to depend on & draw strength from the world around me, but i also need to be able to find reliability, peace, and strength within myself.

what does all of this have to do with “connections”? everything.

and i’ll explain that. but the reason that word is on my mind recently is that i’ve been playing the new york times connections game everyday. there are 16 words on the screen, and the purpose is to create 4 groups (organized by topic) of 4 words each.

i’ve been trying to make these connections in my life lately too - between people in my life, between the seemingly unrelated lessons life has been trying to teach me, and most recently, just within myself. and sometimes, i stare up at the dark ceiling for minutes on end, wondering “what does it all mean?”.

just how some days, i stare hopelessly at the “connections” screen wondering “what could claw and hug have to do with each other?” only to find out that the answer is bear____. bearclaws, bearhugs, and more bearthings. that’s how life feels sometime - just…what?

as i mentioned earlier, there have been some major events in my life over the past few years. one big one i’ve mentioned is my career change from medicine to tech - that has been a grand example of the discord between the life i was living & the life i wanted to live.

other big ones have been illnesses & deaths of family members. falling & choosing to stay in love. major fights, disagreements, and periods of angry no-contact with loved ones. making the transition from a child to an adult - what that means to me, as well as how i communicate that to my family.

each of these sounds like they exist in their own little cubicle, that they would have no connection to each other. but the truth is actually that they’re inextricably intertwined - none of these things are independent of each other.

the illnesses & deaths of family members have taught me the value of life itself. they have taught me that life is built upon the relationships i create in my lifetime. that i must build and grow and nourish the relationships that matter most to me, and that losing someone while they’re alive, in my experience, is so much worse than losing them to death itself. that i must learn to recognize my ego, and that there’s nothing and nobody in the world that is worth sacrificing to my ego. that love is a choice i must make every single day, and that none of this will be easy.

every single thing, even the most seemingly random cluster of events, is connected. i’m learning to recognize & strengthen these connections within my life - to trust that the universe is intentional, and not as random & serendipitous as it seems.

that the elderly man that came in alone & sat across from me in this busy cafe today with a mango pudding & a smile of pure radiance, was not random. he was sent from the universe & was meant to remind me at this particular moment, that being alone is not being lonely. that i can never truly be lonely as long as i know, love, and enjoy my own company.

i choose to believe that the world will continue to send me unfathomable challenges and blessings and signs, but they will all serve a purpose and they will never be more than i can handle. i also choose to believe that these connections won’t be handed to me on a silver platter, and that i need to be intentional about finding & learning from these connections i discover.

and of highest importance to me right now - i am choosing to prioritize finding & maintaining that connection to myself, and balancing that connection to myself with the connections i have with the rest of the world.

at the moment, i’m still discovering what that commitment to connection within myself actually looks like. but as im re-learning myself, im finding the things that make me feel most connected to myself. some of those things are exercising (i feel most inclined towards low-impact exercises like pilates, barre, yoga, and walking lately), reading, writing in my blog, and spending time outdoors. but among this variety of activities, the most challenging, yet important, part of all of this, is creating & keeping a commitment to myself to not only do these things, but to make an effort to be fully present within myself through these activities.

i want to make a consistent effort to not just do these activities for the sake of saying i did them, but to be truly present within myself & find peace within my soul while im doing these. i want to make an effort to not be rigid and tied to a certain activity if it doesn’t bring me peace & self-connection at that moment. that’s not to say that i am choosing to forego discipline or commitment - but to emphasize that i am choosing a commitment to myself above a commitment to any particular activity.

im feeling a sense of peace now that i feel that i have discovered myself a bit more today. i feel a sense of harmony between how i want to feel, and what i have done. my mind feels calm.