A dunk into my pensieve – a reflection on my first 2 years of medical school and a quarter century of life

Here beats a riddle in metric perfection:

A pooling of water in moldable vase,

Ivory frosting to layer on settling cake,

The tabula rasa awaiting its trace.

Half-baked clay, a bubble catching breath,

An anxious snowball hopped on down a rolling hill,

 This lonely grain of sand’s asleep in lustrous jacket.

Here’s pen hovering over paper, hands on clay,

A wind-hungry sail ready to take course.

Here breathes a brand new pair of scissors

That cut itself out from a plastic cell.

-Unknown

I’ve never been good at keeping a diary; indeed, I’d be the first to admit that inconsistency is my greatest flaw. Thus, it is not at all surprising that my first reflection about medical school should be written nearly 2 years after the initiation of our blog, covering half of our entire tenure at Keck. Those 2 years though, those 730 days, I now realize have been some of the most powerful forces in shaping who I am. I’m typically not that person who likes to write about themselves at length, but I will try my best to capture this personal time span in the broadest way I know how. Take from it what you will; just like anything that happens in life, it is not meant to be a teaching point, some kind of universal lesson, but it is a significant experience in the short history of my life, and I hope that you can take something away from it. That’s it; disclaimer over.

Not a waltz but not a foxtrot either

I spent the majority of my first year of med school slipping in and out of a haze. It’s that feeling that you get when you’ve been anticipating something for so long that you become suspended in a surreal state once that moment, that something, arrives.

Like when you stumble through the finish line after months of marathon training, or when you finally
come to the last word of the last page of the last book in the Harry Potter series. I knew that from then on, I would forever conceptualize my life into pre- and post-med school. I had spent so long obsessing over how to get into med school that I never imagined how it would be once I was there. Turns out, it wasn’t too bad. I remember sitting in the first year auditorium during orientation week, listening to one dean or other delivering that oft-cited analogy, the one likening accruing medical knowledge to drinking from a fire hose. I’ve decided, after completing my 2 years of didactic, that school admin can take that fire hose and use it to give themselves an enema; I’m just so sick of it. Not to say that there isn’t truth in it. I will say, though, that the difficulty of the medical program (at least the didactic part) tends to be overhyped; I didn’t know exactly what to expect but I’d heard enough to get the sense that it was going to be pretty damn hard. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was that hard. Sure, I soon found that my last minute habits from undergrad weren’t sustainable, but I still had a good amount of free time. In fact, I could do even more than I did in undergrad. Classes were pass, no pass. I had a car, which meant that I had freedom. I had the whole of Los Angeles at my feet. I’ll have to admit here that I was not gunning for the top grades - I’m sure I’d feel differently if I had been. But I had enough self-insight to know that I am relatively terrible at memorizing floating tidbits; I need a lot of context to commit facts to memory. When trying to understand a medical topic, I’ll trace it not just to its physiology but to its molecular basis (I can’t count the number of times I’ve played article tag only to find that I’ve reached the limit of known knowledge). I don’t mind this about myself, but let me tell you, it was fucking annoying for boards studying. First year, I knew that I could spend a gross amount of time willing minutia into my head but decided that there was no point; refinement was for the clinical years. The half life of random facts in between my synapses is just too short.

Summer is my broken basket

Ah, summer. That stray beam that has pulled so many students through the school year since farm children started getting an education. The summer between first and second year wasn’t just any old summer; it was the last summer. If all works out, it should’ve been the last summer that I spent without any real obligations. Most Keck students wisely use that summer to finish the bulk of their required research project. I’d identified a mentor months earlier and was excited at the prospect of helping conduct studies that would establish a minimal residual disease assay for patients with acute myelocytic leukemia. I had vested so many hopes and dreams into that summer – I was going to take trips up to the bay to visit my boyfriend, old college friends were coming to LA to visit, and we were going to explore all of the festivals and free concerts that the city had to offer. In retrospect, there were so many expectations that I had nowhere to go but down when the unpredictability of research foiled my plans. The results were all wrong. PCRs had to be run again. Products had to be re-sequenced, but there was no one in the sequencing facility to run the machines. The uncertainty of timelines kept me from making any substantial plans, and I was left frustrated and idle.

Whoever said that idle hands are the devil’s playthings had some true insight. I can’t even reliably tell you how it all began (and later, you’ll see that I have a nebulous understanding of how it came to an end), but this is where the meat of the story lies. Somehow, during those barren months of LA summer, I began to reflect on my progress and on myself as a person. Was I close to the person that I wanted to become? Not in the least. I thought about this a lot. I began to worry – no, obsess – that I was not cut out for medicine. There was no one precipitating event that caused this; true, I’d often worried that my hands-on skills would not be up to par, or that my patient interviewing skills were insufficient, but at this point I really shouldn’t have held myself to such a high standard clinic-wise. I recognize that now, but I did then, too. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about my shortcomings. These feelings of doubt came to permeate even my perceptions of self outside the professional realm. Why was I always so unsure of everything? Why did I have such a hard time conversing with people, with building and maintaining friendships?

The only unifying answer to these questions was that I was different. I was stupid, and I’d gotten into medical school by some strange fluke, some cosmic energy that intended to expose my life as a joke – to toss me a scrap of hope only to smirk while I wriggled and flailed to escape the restraints invisible only to me. Once this thought entered my mind, there was nothing that anybody could do or say to wash it out.

A bad time to be an empty shell

If only it were a case of summertime sadness; I thought that having friends and classmates back would summon an end to this self-imposed misery, but how wrong I was. It was actually worse. I developed a crippling social phobia and only set foot on campus to attend required activities. It was remarkably easy to avoid social interactions, as almost all of the lectures are also webcast, and I couldn’t be bothered to attend the few that were not. I spent most of my time lurking in my apartment, then shut myself in my room once my roommates got home. My thoughts and me, me and my thoughts – I knew that the isolation was amplifying the negativity, but I was starting to feel physically ill when put into social situations. I’d been an anxious person for most of life (I’d say up until now); there was so much to worry about - worry of not finding the right words in conversation, worry of exposing my ignorance every time I wanted to ask a question, worry of worrying too much about what people thought of me. But it had never gotten this out of control. Suddenly, all of what confidence I had was stripped away, and what was left was an empty shell.

The point in life is

To find a point

That is sharp enough

To keep the mind engaged

The body moving

It could be anything

            An insatiable hunger for knowledge

                        The innocence of a child

                                    A vain little rose boasting a single thorn

If the point

Is no point

Then there’s no point

In a point

If/then (.)

And if there was ever a bad time to be an empty shell, it was then. It wasn’t like the world had stopped spinning now that I was feeling unwell; it felt that it was spinning faster in mockery of my unfit condition. Of course, the fire hose of medical school was not stoppered one bit; we were learning the most physiologically complex of the systems – cardio, pulmonary, and renal. As I’ve said, my memory isn’t that good, but it’d never been that bad. I’d often read a sentence 5+ times before even realizing that I was not processing at all. My thoughts were nowhere but everywhere, fumbling down jumbled, dark alleyways. On top of that, my older sister was getting married, and I was the maid of honor, scrambling to put together a bachelorette party that wouldn’t suck. Even though I usually enjoy writing, I could not bring myself to write my MOH speech and had panic attacks over whether I would finish it and whether it could encapsulate what my sister meant to me. Sadly, my anxiety was such that I couldn’t even regard her wedding day as a joyous occasion. Twice, I thought I would vomit or run from the platform when I forgot the words to the ceremonial poetry reading. I was training for a half-marathon and barely had the energy to run more than once a week. Balancing these activities wouldn’t have been a cake walk, even had I been in a better mental state; in this mentally broken state, I felt like I was in hell. I was so exhausted by my thoughts that there was little energy to distribute among everything else. What started off as small, innocuous thoughts were starting to transform my reality – the lack of confidence set off self-fulfilling loops where my uncertainty during patient interviews would yield poor results; my anxiety was somaticizing to plague me with total body aches (from physically trying to shrink from other people) and a strange burning, tingling sensation running along the sagittal plane of my scalp.

If you haven’t noticed already, up til now I’ve refrained from labeling my condition as depression, but there; I’ve said it. Depression. For how often statistics on depression are cited within the medical community and how known it is that rates are high amongst students and doctors, the conversation about it remains somewhat closed and enigmatic in that hardly anyone is willing to expose themselves as having gone through a depressive episode. In a sense, it shows weakness, some flaw in one’s hierarchy of thinking or perhaps a general “softness”. Everyone else is dealing with the same pressures, so why do some prevail while others cave and crumble?

That is the beginning of the 1001 fallacies in thinking with which depression clouds the mind. I don’t know how I can faithfully recreate the sense of what it feels like, but I’ll try my best with the following. Please forgive how non sequitur the following might be ---

i.                A timeline

I am a creative person

            I thought I was a creative person

                        Other people have told me that I am creative

                                    Other people don’t actually know me

                                                I am not creative at all

                                                            I have no original thoughts

                                                                        Why can’t I be like everybody else

ii.              On therapy

It just won’t work. I’ve been living my entire life wrong, all wrong. Everything that I’ve thought since conception has been essentially flawed. Thoughts about who I am. What I can achieve. I’ve spent 24 years building this base of knowledge, this repertoire of experiences, but I have absolutely nothing to show for it. I thought that I knew things, but it was all an illusion. A mere house of cards, an inverted pyramid that just toppled over when grazed with the slightest bit of breath. How did I get this way. How am I an actual person. Is it a possible for one, at 24, to unlearn everything and start from scratch? Not even a lifetime of therapy will straighten out this Winchester home of thoughts.

iii.             There are 3 kinds of people: people who take action, people who observe action, and people who after the fact ask, “what happened?”

I am the 3^rd class. I’m a no one, part of no group, with seeing eyes but an unseeing mind. I’m a fly on the wall obsessing over how normal people – the others – are able to interact. Able to laugh and cry and fleetingly be one together. I sit at cafes to do “work”, but I find myself shamelessly eavesdropping; I can’t even stop myself. What is everyone else talking about, and how does everyone else think? How should I presume? Maybe I can study this, instead, and finally learn to be normal. I just want to be able to talk about the weather. Mindless celebrity gossip. Anything, as long as it doesn’t make my thoughts race and pander to look for what to say next. What I wouldn’t give to effortlessly be a part of your world, the world of the living. Forgive my intrusion: I don’t know how to be.

iv.             Mornings

Who A.M. I?

      I A.M. one who never wants to arouse from this slumber, this opium that nature has so graciously given us, free of charge.

      Yesterday’s P.M. felt fine, just fine. The best I’d felt in a while. Surely things are on the up and up. Tomorrow is a new day.

      Today’s A.M. and I A.M. back to square one. I have 16 waking hours to get through – an eternity. I must get myself out of bed. I must write an email. I must do all the small things that make me a person. “Person”.

      Mornings are supposed to be rebirth, a temporal and metaphoric A.M.niotic sac. But.

      They are not. How I wish they were A.M.nesia instead.

      An indefinite A.M.nesia.

                  That would be nice.

v.              Depression is not the opposite of happiness; it’s the opposite of vitality

During the worst of my depression, I serendipitously happened upon a TED talk about the topic. Interestingly, I attended a mental health talk on campus well after I’d gotten better which featured the same TED talk. It truly seemed that I’d come full circle, but I can’t help but think that there is really nothing that is keeping me from slipping back down that hellish slope. Every word that the speaker uttered resonated so deeply with me that it felt as if he actually knew my story. One of the phrases that I know I will carry with me forever is the line used as the title of this section. If you think about it, happiness is not the exception, but it isn't the norm either. Unless you’re on drugs or one of the rare personality types that might label you as a “hippie”, you’re probably not happy ALL the time and can pinpoint some handfuls of occasions that you’d consider truly joyous. That’s not sad; that’s just how it is because our baselines are just not designed that way. It’d be a bit energy-intensive, I’d think. However, just because you’re not happy doesn’t mean that you’re sad. Regardless, for people who are not depressed, there is a general vitality, a zest for life. You might wake up, stub your toe, forget to eat your bagel and run to work only to get yelled at by your boss and think, this is a shitty day, but these events wouldn’t push you over the edge and make you want to give up on life. You still have that zest and think about all the other things you want to accomplish, all of those relationships that you’ve already built and still want to work on. Even if you can’t vocalize it, there is that basal, primitive instinct to pick yourself up and keep going; for many, that is the only option. However, universally among the depressed, there comes a day where one reaches the epiphany that there is an option. For me, this thought was a little gremlin that danced and smirked in a corner of my mind; I knew he was there, but I did my best to ignore him because I knew that any glance, any bit of acknowledgement would just egg him on, and who knows what he could’ve done. I was afraid of my gremlin and didn’t want to admit to myself that he was there because then I knew that’d be admitting that I had a problem. He was most active during the morning hours when my circadian clock would rudely awaken me to this reality, whispering into the deepest parts of my subcortical matter that just maybe, maybe, it’d be better to not wake up one day. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I got into an accident and stopped being a burden to the world. I knew that I would never actively do anything to endanger myself, but who knows… maybe if I’d ignored it long enough, this gremlin could’ve quietly started a coup that would’ve hijacked my subconscious and made me engage in risky behavior leading to an untimely demise.

Anyway, for anyone who might be hiding from such a gremlin, and maybe for everyone in general, I think that it is helpful to keep sight of what drives you. What is the source of the fire that keeps you going through your day? You should celebrate it and do all you can to keep it burning. One of the most painfully vivid images that the TED talk speaker paints is that of a typical morning in the life of one suffering from depression. You’re lying in bed and the phone rings, but you continue to stare off into the distance, completely squashed by a sense of hopelessness. You hear the persistent ringing, but it’s not enough to stir any kind of motion or intention in you to pick it up. He doesn’t say it, but to me, this is life trying to call you, and you don’t want to answer. Instead, you think about the mundane activities of the day that you’re obliged to do, and suddenly, every email that you must answer, conversation you must engage in, seems like a mountain you must summit. I encourage everyone to listen to this TED talk because chances are, if you haven’t felt what is being described, you know someone who has. Someone who might right now be lying in bed and listening to that phone ring and ring and ring.

vi.             Just because it’s all in your head, Harry, doesn’t make it any less real”

Depression, anxiety, thoughts of we’re just not enough

Just thoughts.

But we work and we work

We dissect, we sift, turn over and repeat

And as an oyster to its pearl…

A bit of light becomes a particle

A ball of gas becomes a star

All of the intangibles swirl and collide until

They condensate into Matter

All that matters is that matter

That dark matter that

Bends light to shape illusions

But what is reality but

Illusions that majorities agree upon?

vii.           One direction

My body is an anchor

My mind is an anchor

No, I am the anchor

Sinking, sinking slowly to the bottom

What bottom, one that I’ve yet to reach

If it is there. Sometimes I wonder.

Above me, a halo of light fades fast into a pinhole -

Then there is nothing.

How do I know whether I’m going up, or down,

Or worse - just going in one plane, one infinite circle

Without even knowing

I’m not too far from where I started

Maybe there are people down here, too,

But we don’t see each other;

Each “here” is so different,

But in a sense all is alike in the darkness.

Two lungs that swell with water

A loss of buoyancy, that bounce of life,

And I know that I should scream

But maybe I don’t want to.

Maybe it won’t matter.

Maybe this is better.

To be silent,

To succumb to the tight embrace of darkness

Because here, in the dark

I can be what I want to be

See what I want to see

Or not be

Not see.

I wove this cocoon all by myself

Climbing out; no, more like being expelled. As I mentioned before, this transition out of depression is a bit hazy, to say the least, but I hope that there is still something to learn from it. When I realized that there was something wrong, I did what I could to become normal again. I opened up to my family and a smattering of friends. To do this, I had to put aside my pride because yes, it involved admitting that there was problem that was out of my control. This was particularly hard given that my loved ones had always assumed that my life was together, based off of the knowns (mostly, the fact that I was together enough to be in medical school and performing decently). Yet, despite how much opening up and talking I did, and how much listening and reflecting, I could not emerge from my hole, my cocoon. Unbeknownst to me until it was too late, I realized that I’d haphazardly woven a barrier between myself and the world. I wasn’t sure what had gone into its construction, but I knew that it would be beyond this lifetime for me to dissemble it.

That’s how it felt, anyhow. When I first saw a psychologist, I knew even before I finished my story that she would be bamboozled at why I was sitting in that chair… I had no history of a mood disorder, nor did the members of my immediate family; there was no precipitating event for why I was feeling this way. However, from what she gleaned, she firmly believed that I needed medical therapy. Right away. Even though I knew that taking medication wouldn’t actually change who I was at the core, I was still resistant to this idea, which was a so novel to me (despite pursuing a career that hands out prescriptions, right). I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that my thoughts might not be entirely organic, that whatever happiness I could derive while on medication was not self-generated but contingent on a little pill. I was referred to a community psychologist after declining the prescription because the psychologist believed that it would take more sessions than covered by the student health fee. Hope began to flee me; if this stranger, this specialist, thought I needed therapy indefinitely, maybe what was broken could never be fixed. I was relieved when the new psychologist told me that he didn’t believe that we had to go straight to meds. He gave me what would generally be considered a simple prescription: resume what I (used to) love to do and make new friends. Easy enough, right? You have to remember that getting out of bed was a struggle at that point; it actually felt like there were invisible restraints strapping me to my mattress. Who would even want to be my friend? I had no new thoughts, nothing to offer. As for resuming what I loved to do, I began to doubt whether I had a passion for anything. Playing the uke, running, tossing a disc… these were phases, at best. I truly came to believe that there was nothing in the world that could define me anymore, other than this great, unbearable sadness.

This new pair of scissors

Then, one day, someone reached out to me. She somehow wriggled her way past the fibers of my cocoon and invited me to go on a run. It started off as something so beautifully, so laughably simple. Of course, being the pessimist that I was, I kept thinking there was no way that she would keep seeking my company; I was convinced that everyone could see me for the joy-sucking dementor that I’d become. But she asked for another run. Ok, maybe she likes my running speed, like I was some kind of car with the right specs. And another. Part of me dreaded the runs because I was still socially anxious – what would I talk about? Would she grow bored of me? How would I have the energy to run and think about topics of conversation? But with each run, things became more organic, and the dread began to drop away until I realized that we actually clicked and that I looked forward to the runs. It had been a long time since I’d looked forward to something, since I’d even had a thought about the future that wasn’t saturated with darkness and dread. Or worse, a future that was barren of anything because I couldn’t imagine a future. This was the beginning of my recovery. Strange as it was, everything else seemed to fall into place once I had concrete evidence that I could connect to people after all, that someone could like me for who I was and that I wasn’t some pitiful social anomaly. Among all my internally-generated thoughts, it took an external force to break my cycle of thinking. A deux ex machina. Something has to expose the wonderful wizard for being just an ordinary man. As one suffering from depression, you have to put yourself out there enough to welcome these opportunities for recovery. As one who is not depressed, if you have the opportunity to be someone’s deux ex machina, please please please take it.

Of course, it turned out that the root of my evils rested with my self esteem, and this is not always the case in depression (although it is often part of that cocoon). What is generally true, though, is that, brick by brick, the depressed will inevitably build a fortress that rests on one or a couple of warped “truths”. The more we succumb under the weight of these bricks, the truer the skewed reality becomes. Sometimes, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy effect; other times, isolation of the mind substantiates poisonous thoughts into a personal reality. It might not be true, but our perception makes it true, and once the thought is conceived and nurtured to some degree, it is hard to root out, despite what anyone might say to the contrary. Most friends I ask tell me that they had no idea that I was going through a depressive episode; I thought that everyone could see through my façade – such was my reality.

Even though I don’t want anyone to have to go through this experience – indeed, it is my greatest fear that I could ever feel even half as bad again – I don’t look back upon this with an ounce of regret. I had to go through this in order to achieve the stability that I feel today. I have actually never felt as alive as I do now. In retrospect, I had been living my whole life imprisoned by my anxiety (of not being accepted, not succeeding, not saying the right thing, not living up to my potential, whatever that was) that I wasn’t living up to my potential. I wasn’t enjoying life the way it should be enjoyed, and everything seemed like such a huge fucking deal. My depression showed me what a life without hope looked like; I became so familiar with the solitary landscape, its never-ending circular paths leading to nowhere but a numbing desolation. I was scared, but I thought, this is where I belong. No one belongs here. I can’t even describe to you the joy of returning to the land of the living. Or maybe it wasn’t so much returning as it was discovering. After hitting rock bottom and knowing what that felt like, I was suddenly able to shed the weight of my anxiety and start living as I never had before. I was no longer afraid to ask questions in class because I wasn’t worried about anything but learning so that one day, I could help. I could finally speak my mind and tell people what I think and when I think they’ve wronged me. I could talk to almost any stranger because I’m no longer worried about how I might seem to them but am genuinely interested in their story. I’ve shamelessly asked for free food from vendors just before closing time. There are so many things that I’ve come to appreciate about life, and every day has been a good day because it’s a day that I have all my autonomy, my health, and control over my thoughts. In letting go of my anxiety, I am finally here; I am present. I can think so much more lucidly, and I have been thinking of all the projects I want to do, inventions, songs, blog posts, strengthening old relationships and creating new ones. I truly hope that, no matter where you are in life or how you’re feeling, you can eventually arrive at your own appreciation for life – find your zest. You may have to take a few risks and get yourself out of your comfort zone to get there, but if you have freedom of thought, you have all you need to get there. You will get there, because what is the alternative?

Here beats a riddle in metric perfection:

A pooling of water in moldable vase,

Ivory frosting to layer on settling cake,

The tabula rasa awaiting its trace.

Half-baked clay, a bubble catching breath,

An anxious snowball hopped on down a rolling hill,

 This lonely grain of sand’s asleep in lustrous jacket.

Here’s pen hovering over paper, hands on clay,

A wind-hungry sail ready to take course.

Here breathes a brand new pair of scissors

That cut itself out from a plastic cell.

-Sophia Giang, 2011

Living high-yield

For those of you who are obsessed with high-yield bullets, I’ve assembled this list of key points I wanted to make. You should really stop being such a goddamn gunner though. Either that or take full ownership of your gunnerhood and enjoy every bit of it J

1.     Be present. If you live with regrets, you live in the past. If you live with too much worry, you live in the future. Just do the best that you can now, and that’s all you or anyone can ask for.

2.     Kinds of stress: the first is the kind that saves your ass when a tiger is running after you or when Step 1 is in 3 days and you haven’t touched a whole section of First Aid. The second is the kind that cripples you from doing what you need to do. If you’re stressed, ask yourself, is that stress helping me, or is it making me want to crawl into a fetal position and sublimate? Be mindful. Know that this is what crippling, unproductive stress feels like and let it go.

3.     There is more than one route to what you want. Of course, do your best now to set yourself up for success, but don’t obsess over not accomplishing all that you want to achieve at this very instant. Leave time for enjoying life because that in itself is an investment into your mental health and your future.

4.     Don’t live with regrets. What you’ve done has brought you to where you are today. All you can do is work toward the person you want to become, and once you get there, you won’t be able to say that those negative experiences and mistakes did nothing to shape you. Unless you spoil a Game of Thrones plot for somebody. Then you’re an awful person and you deserve to wallow in regret for the rest of your life.

5.     You don’t know better than anybody else 98% of the time, so don’t backseat drive someone else’s life. All you can do is make suggestions based off of your experiences. Don’t judge because you can never know what someone else’s reality is and what gremlins might be plaguing them.

6.     Don’t be afraid to ask for something. Just think of the extent of favors you would do for somebody, anybody, even a complete stranger. Most of those favors are not a big deal, right? Just be sure to do your part in return. Why are we so afraid of other people?

7.     We interact with such a tiny sliver of the world. There is something to learn from everybody. Even the shittiest person can at least teach you how to be less shitty.

8.     We are not the summation of our experiences but the summation of how we process our experiences. Process with optimism. I once heard a podcast about a woman living with a calcified amygdala, a basal part of our brain that is responsible for fear and emotion. She’d been held at gunpoint at least twice, but it didn’t traumatize her because she couldn’t process it as a negative experience. I mean, there are 99 problems in living without an amygdala, but PTSD aint one. 

9.     You have control over your thoughts. Let go of the bad ones. Never feel like you’ve wasted your time, whether it was doing something or being with somebody. You know what’s an even bigger waste of time? Harping over these matters and letting them influence your mood and outlook.

10. Unless you have borderline personality disorder, the world and its people are not divided into good and bad. One event doesn’t make you a bad person because it is usually the subconscious culmination of something you’ve already been thinking. Not all of the time but most. Good and bad are society’s way of watering down situations and standardizing the way people process information. As long as you’re living the life you want to live and not impinging on other people’s right to happiness, you just keep doing your thang.

And thus is the summary of my first quarter century of life. I hope that you were able to take something away from it, and for those of you who are still trying to ignore or battle your own gremlins, know that it’s going to take serious work but there will come a day where you will prevail and hopefully come to embrace this dark period in your life as truly formative years that made you stronger and gave you a greater zest for life. As the greats have said,

      You only know you’ve been high when you’re feeling low

You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow

YOLO

They sure know how to comment on the importance of a diversity of experiences and mortality.

For those of you who didn’t get anything from reading this much text other than a headache, you really should’ve stopped while you were ahead. There was even a disclaimer. But hey, #noregrets

Sincerely,

Soph