I get home early one day and book myself a massage. There is a massage place a few blocks from me, Massage Ultra. It seems forsaken, in a sort of overworked, typecast adjective sort of way. I’ve never seen anyone go in. I hardly ever go myself, but lately I’ve renewed my interest, wondering who else keeps their business alive.

This Massage Ultra seems to be run by mostly Chinese people. Today my masseuse asks me what part hurts.

Shoulder? Back?

My brain, I want to reply. I wonder if it ever occurred to her that sometimes people get massages just for fun, and not because something hurts. Or maybe everyone has a part of them that hurts, always.

Try as I might, I can’t turn my brain off. At some point, I must have grumbled, because she asks me if she’s pushing too hard.

It’s okay to say, she says in Mandarin. You can tell me.

No, it’s fine, I mumble, finally mustering the confidence...

She burns, not knowing
the light she is.

For the past year, I have not written creatively. This is the longest time I have spent away from writing since my elementary school days. For a while I attributed my creative absence to the demands of being a resident physician. During the COVID-19 pandemic, my working hours stayed roughly the same while my non-working hours expanded into emptiness, yet nothing changed. Call it ennui; call it writer’s block (although I believe you cannot have writer’s block unless you are actively trying to write something, which I was not). Day after day, cursors blinked. Blank walls stared back.

Last summer, I had a conference call with my editor. When I was a medical student, I won a writing award sponsored by a small publisher affiliated with Bryn Mawr. I was awarded, as part of the prize, a contract for a future book. At the time, I had pitched a collection of nonfiction essays (“about medicine...

When I’m not in the hospital, I, like many of you, have been socially distant. I was texting one of my friends today who told me about a walking date she went on with the man she’s been seeing. At some point in their walk, they stood, 6 feet apart, staring into each other’s eyes and longing for physical touch.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was a musician—the greatest voice in the land, etc. as the epithets, go—and his wife, Eurydice dies. (There are variations in the myths surrounding the cause of her death, but anyway, she dead.)

So Orpheus goes to Hades, the Lord of the Underworld, and he sings for him and begs him to bring her back. And Hades, shockingly, agrees, on one condition: for the entirety of the journey back to the land of the living, Orpheus is not allowed to look at her.

So Orpheus sets off on his journey back from...

In my first year as an obstetrician-gynecologist, I cultivated a habit of documenting everything that happened outside the hospital and almost nothing that happened within it. A day off resulted in photographs of everything I ate, drank, and otherwise experienced, through the lens of my mobile device. A weekend became a montage—a vacation, a deluge. Perhaps I worried that I would forget all my hours spent not working. The illusion was as much for others as it was for me.

When I started residency, the bare necessities—sleep, exercise, regular meals, any meals—became hot commodities. Perhaps it was simpler for me than it was for others. I had no child, no partner, and no pet. After killing five potted basils in rapid succession, I had no one to care for but myself. I was determined to become an expert in self-care.

Self-care, I later realized, was nothing more than a proxy for self-love.

In my first season of first dates after moving to Boston, I was asked over and over what I did for fun. My answers varied from reading (but everyone reads, chimed a voice in my head) to writing (but I was never ready to talk about it) to exercising (“I don’t believe anyone enjoys exercise,” a prospective date once retorted). In a given week as a resident physician, I had on average one day off, the contents of which could be distilled into a few scenes. The opening minutes would feature me lying sideways in bed half-awake, cocooned in the warmth of my comforter while methodically scrolling from one social media app to the next on my cell phone. What followed would be a montage in which I ran all the errands that had accumulated over a week of adult life, pushed buttons on the dishwasher, washed my laundry, vacuumed everywhere—hardly thrilling conversation. I developed a habit of eating...

I am supposed to be writing a book. But the final weeks of summer catch me tripping in my clogs on my way to the hospital, barely awake, watching the first pink streak of daylight cut across the inky sky. I keep track of time by the Chinese folk playing cards at the picnic table in the playground across from my apartment. Only a few nights did I come home after they were gone, and only then did I feel that there were no more hours left in the day.

On my day off, I read an essay by Judith Thurman called “Maltese for Beginners.” It’s about hyperpolyglots—those who speak a multitude of languages. “The accepted threshold is eleven,” Thurman writes. She speaks three. I do, too. We are, as Thurman explains, “nothing to boast of in most parts of the world, where multilingualism is the norm. People who live at a crossroads of cultures… acquire languages without considering it a noteworthy...

I imagine the universe began the way my own life begins: on a balmy summer evening, the first whispers of a fall breeze against my cheek. I am walking the path between two college courtyards, the grass wet with dew, a dim, perfect halo encircling every streetlamp. I am walking the three blocks from the 96th Street subway station in New York City to my apartment on 98th Street, past the graveyard shift fruit vendor and the darkened grocery stores, the vacant basketball court still echoing with pickup games past. I am thinking about what Junot Diaz wrote in his story, “The Sun, The Moon, The Stars”: as soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end.

There is no representative moment for the end of medical school—no photograph, memory, or quote that sticks with me because, approximately one week before commencement, time abruptly accelerated, the earth spun off kilter, and...

I mastered the art of subway reading in my second month of living in New York, having discovered early in life that there is no better way to avoid eye contact than by burying oneself in a book. These days, on the 40-minute ride from Jackson Heights to the Upper East Side, I am nose deep in A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. I generally refrain from offering opinions on books before I have finished them, lest my latest fancy take an Interstellar-esque turn at the eleventh hour (perplexing at best, disastrous at worst). But apart from overstuffed patient records and guidelines on arteriovenous fistulas, A Little Life is by far the best thing I’ve read all week, all month, all year.

It is about a group of friends—which I normally avoid, preferring my own group of real live friends, who complain just as much but are exceedingly entertaining—in New York City—which I also avoid, to bolster...