I guess i’m looking for a reason to be somewhere.

She has stories that would terrify many, but she has lived with these stories for so long that she is no longer afraid, just tired. She needs to speak, she wants to rest; instead of doing either, she listens. A White woman describes her hair as thick black silk; her eyes as almonds; her golden brown […]

It’s a garden variety depression in that it creeps up and before you know it you are walking around feeling like shit for 60 consecutive hours every time you get a weekend off. The self talk sounds like this: there is a way that you won’t have to go to work tomorrow and perform wellness […]

She has given her love, made mistakes, and followed a calling. For all this, she has been met with fear, admiration, and caring– but from afar. As long as there are “kinds” of girls, she is the “kind” of girl people talk themselves out of love with. She has grown scared of how lonely life […]

They are feeding me glimpses of what it will be like to lead. I rise to the occasion. I try to interpret my uncomfortable self-regard not as inadequacy but as having ample space to learn. The truth is, I often encounter situations in which I feel helpless. This evening, for example, my patient went into […]

The last person I dated was somebody whom I ended up ghosting after a quick month, upon realizing that he was always trying to goad me into talking about God from his own logical-positivist perspective. It wasn’t his atheism that bothered me: for nearly eight years, I was madly in love and in a functional, […]

I often hear my attendings who have grown children of their own urging their 2-week postpartum patients, who are struggling through the sleepless, bloody, sore, swollen, leaking, messy delirium of new parenthood, to enjoy this time in their lives. These same attendings also urge me to enjoy residency. And I often think, what’s there to enjoy […]

I am actually growing more and more powerful But I shrink for others I am actually growing new limbs But I erase myself in the process

I pause before this meal, simple as it is, to say a brief prayer of thanks to the goddess in me for preparing it as an act of love towards myself. I bow my head, humbled by the goddess in me, by how she is called to love others and myself. I am overwhelmed by […]

2.4 The eerie drag of a slow night on call brings out my attention-craving moon in Leo. What shall I do with myself this run of nights? Should I orchestrate another elaborate, abusive international texting relationship with a stranger, based more on attention than on respect? Shall I allow the social isolation of being awake […]