Update

I have tried a new experiment this time. Rather than in one moment writing out all of my thoughts, I have kept a record of my thoughts and feelings over the course of the last week. The result is a little more disjointed than usual and in some ways more personal, be warned now. To give the short of it, this week was a few thousand steps backwards in terms of my emotional journey coming home. Additionally, I was hit is a new set back, my research project needs to be completely redone. There goes nearly a year of work. These are some of my reflections and while I could have kept them to myself, I did feel some need to post them more publically. I still don't know why I prefer this medium of sharing my life, perhaps it is because I acknowledge that I am not wise or experienced enough to understand myself and by publically stating it I hope for some kind of help. This feels more real. An honest acknowledgement of myself. It is a way to embrace who I am, because if I don't share it then it suggest there is something I dislike or am ashamed of about myself. Well, I suppose I should get on with it. These musings are for another time. 

It is amazing the need I feel to impact my surroundings, to truly inhabit them. I am suffocated by the endless fear that my absence will not be felt, particularly in a space I enjoyed inhabiting. If I've found a home, a place worth being, then I want to mark it as my space, wrap myself in the scenery, make an indention in the matter that makes my absence a void, a reminder that I am not there. For I know that to be forgotten is a true death. To be forgotten by people you care about, a more true death than any in mortal flesh. (I find the drama, while melancholy in nature, also peaceful because my feelings are melancholy in nature and weigh me down. It makes me sad to think that honesty and phrasing make others rebuke and mock my feelings. There is truth in melodrama. Sometimes things are felt strongly enough to warrant strong responses. Just because language seems extreme it doesn't mean I don't have the experience to judge it so and or that I am trying to manipulate people into being sympathetic.)  It feels as though my life before England was filled with half emotions. To feel is to be alive. I remember the haze only interrupted by Gencon and moments of embarrassment. I recognize that memory is an untrustworthy historian, and I'm sure there were a few happy moments as well as there were sad ones in England. Memory is all I have and I think back to the moment where I sat beside someone I cared about and thought, come a months time or two, I will be sitting somewhere else, far from this person and the new place will feel more real than this moment. This space will be only memory and imagination, a pale replacement for real life. I will begin to question its reality and make fictitious accounts of this experience. It will no longer be the present. I will lose its presence in my self and I will be entrenched in an experience which lacks even an ounce of the life I so enjoyed. I will be trapped in a foreign place which I have no desire to impart myself into. I will mourn a space I left more strongly than any person who still inhabits the space around it. Because I know that my impact will be lost. Like an impression in snow, my presence is impermanent. I will be forgotten. I will die. 

and no, it will not be a quick death. It will be a slow one. Like a terminal patient, I will get many visitors for a time, then fewer and then none. I anticipate the loneliness and that loneliness when it comes will be unbearable. 

The emotions I am having are unstable at best and self destructive at worst. My back has clenched in more ways than I can count and despite spending an hour meditating and trying to relax, I only felt a deep pain in both my upper and lower back. I get anxious all of the time, often without reason. I have been prone to burst of anger so red and hot that the thought of punching someone or something was appealing for the catharsis. I feel like I can't rely on my friends because they don't quite understand these feelings and many are struggling with their own version of suffering. To rely on them would be cruel and burdensome, Particularly when there is little they can do. Sympathy or empathy are unhelpful as while they may alleviate temporary stress and frustration, when those feelings are constant, it becomes disingenuous. My attempts to find solutions have all been met with failure and I am stuck and hopeless. I just need something to change and I've run out of options or the only changes I see are ones that are worse. 

My family suggested medication or therapy and that terrifies me more. Why should someone live a way that makes them unhappy? Taking medication or even therapy feels like treating a symptom not a cause. It is a step to live with a situation, giving up, making a situation bearable. Why shouldn't we listen to our feelings? Why do I feel like everyone denies their feelings and expects me to do the same? 

One of the struggles is that my life is filled with so much tedium that there is often little time to seek alternatives. I waste my time with my courses which aren't preparing me for my future career and are meaningless boxes that I have to tick to receive a piece of paper that says I'm competent enough to continue my education. It is remarkable how little this year will impact my future and I am left questioning why it has to happen at all. I've taken the MCAT and my applications are sent out. I struggle to see how this year is making me a better physician and given the struggle it is to live through, I wish that I didn't have to bother. 

I have found some calm, today or yesterday, and this is through the realization that I have to find some way to make being alone fulfilling. Which for an extrovert like me is like asking a person to live in a desert with no water.  I read somewhere that happiness is about action. It is engaging in activity which makes you happy. Passivity is never going to make a person happy. And I do try. I have tried many times to actively pursue happiness, but with little luck these last couple months. It is funny, in moments where something resembling the activity I once liked occurs, I become giddy with emotion as all the emotions and outlets that have remained bottled up spill over. Similarly, in those moments alone, I still find the pain creep out and suffocate me. Where I thought I was done crying, I find more tears and suffering.