Life-Work Balance
At a party during the first week of med school, an older student told me to make sure I don’t lose my identity. My first thought was, What the hell are you talking about? After a month of classes, I’m starting to see what he meant. Between studying and the gym and half-assed attempts at cooking (read: frozen dinners from Trader Joe’s), I barely have time for emotions other than frustration and annoyance and whatever unconscionable feeling causes me to begin my gchats with “Gahhhh.” My thoughts are an infinite loop of blood supply and innervation and the pages of Grant’s dissector I’m supposed to read for tomorrow. The only thing I ever talk about is med school—which, my boyfriend pointed out, does not make for particularly interesting conversation.
There are days when I feel as if I’m incomplete, as if there is a part of me out there doing the things I used to do. At Yale it was easy to describe myself: I am an English major who loves cooking and writing and wushu, who wants to be a gynecologist and teach teenagers about sexual health. I don’t know how to introduce myself at Sinai, where labels such as English major or wushu or Stilesian are no longer relevant. Or maybe it’s just me, deluding myself into thinking that it has to be so. If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, then a Sue who is not an English major is still… a Sue.
It’s hard, at the end of a long night in the 12th floor study rooms, to convince myself that I am the same person I was 4 months ago. I’ve opened up half a dozen Word documents in the past few weeks, begging myself to write something other than lecture notes. I bought a book at The Strand after my midterm and read a few pages on the subway before tucking it into my backpack, realizing that I’ll never have time to finish. Even picking out a book was daunting without course syllabi and trustworthy professors telling me what to read. Before school started, I promised myself that I would never stop reading. Since then, I’ve flipped through three hundred pages of Gray’s Anatomy and hardly a hundred words of fiction. I’ve been telling myself to calm down, to take things one bit at a time, remember that no one can do everything… but my biggest fear is that one day I’ll look back and realize that all I did during med school was medicine.
One day, when Kent and I were walking down the steps behind Annenberg, we started talking about “life-work balance.” I told him I’d usually heard it the other way around: work before life. But why? “Life-work” doesn’t roll off the tongue as nicely, but it’s got its priorities straight. Marvin told me that one of his professors has a quote above his desk that says: Don’t get so caught up with making a living that you forget to make a life. Elisa said something similar today: I don’t like thinking that my primary occupation is to provide for a small amount of enjoyment elsewhere.
My small amounts of enjoyment are wushu classes in Chinatown, working out with David in the mornings, lattes with whole milk, and boba (the elixir of life). At wushu, I can finally be Sue (or Sis, which is what Wendell—the assistant coach—calls me) and not a medical student. At coffee shops, I can crack open a book or type away on my laptop and pretend I’m back at Blue State, working on my senior essay. Most of my friends prefer to study close to Sinai, but I need to get away and find spaces in the city where I can be myself.
This morning, I sat by the window at La Colombe Torrefaction, grabbed pork buns at Golden Steamer, window shopped in SoHo, and indulged in fancy yogurt at the Chobani store. I told David afterwards that it was “one of those days when I love New York and everything is beautiful.” What I meant was something like what Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five:
Everything is beautiful and nothing hurt.
But my thoughts of beauty and happiness and carpe diem (Latin for YOLO) went to bits as I sat down at a desk in Bobst Library and opened up Gray’s. Walking back from the subway station after dusk, I realized that I dreaded coming back to Aron Hall because it felt like going home after a night out only to find your parents still up, paring their fingernails or watching TV. Whatever fun I’d had that day is over, whatever I’d tried to get away from when I left in the morning is still waiting for me. I’ll never win.
It’s not that I hate med school—anatomy is actually really fascinating and our professors are fantastic. In college, I taped a sheet of paper on my wall that said VAGINAS, to remind myself on the darkest days why I am doing this. (I could have written MD or OB/GYN or SEXUAL HEALTH, but no… vaginas.) And it’s incredibly fulfilling to know that each day of medical school brings me one step closer to my goal. But I hate the feeling of being one-dimensional; I hate that I’m losing an outlet for my other passions because there aren’t enough hours in the day. I get it. I can’t work out every morning and go to wushu twice a week and still have time to read a book or write an essay or make cucumber turtles, all while being a (successful) med student. Something has to give, whether it’s spending less time in the wushu studio or wholeheartedly taking advantage of pass-fail grading. But it’s hard to settle for less when less wushu or less writing or less (ahem, fewer) cucumber turtles means less Sue. I don’t know how to distinguish what I do from who I am, what I love from why I live. Maybe one day I’ll figure it out. But until then I will lose sleep, start books I’ll never finish, write at 2AM, and wander around the city until I find my place.