I’ve been asked several times this year if I’m lonely. I’ve come up with an answer that is perhaps more succinct than it is honest but still seems to capture the spirit of what I’m feeling — that I’m not socially lonely, but experientially. I find myself surrounded by tourists with sleep schedules thrown to the wind and medical professionals overwhelmed by fifty hour workweeks. I’m caught in this experience both somewhere in between and somewhere else altogether.
As I sat down to re-read my past quarterly reflections, perhaps hoping to discover some measurable progress, I felt stuck with what to write about. I re-read journal entries searching for some meaningful insight or noteworthy experience but came up short. Past epiphanies now seemed expected, as though they were merely the inevitable result of the circumstances that led to them.
But if these past three months have taught me something, beknownst to me or not, perhaps it is to sit with uncomfortable emotions. As I was rereading, I found myself surprised by the pages of negativity and chaos I outpoured, as I couldn’t even remember the instances that left me feeling passionate enough to use words like “extravaganza” and “fiasco.” There was something about crossing the halfway point of the year that made it difficult to match the enthusiasm I entered the year with. And although I’d like to describe myself as an optimist, these journal entires painted a different picture.
“The excitement has worn off a bit and it just feels heavy. It’s a lot of making decisions and rationalizing and guessing, and asking, and trying, and it’s just hard. No one tells you you’re doing it right, and even when they do, you don’t believe them because you know they don’t really know what you’re doing anyway.”
“I feel all this pressure, and I catch glimpses where I can zoom out and say to myself ‘I’m proud of you’ because I can notice what an accomplishment it is to even be here, but I’m paralyzed by the fear that at the end of this I might not be any the wiser.”
"I was given a year with no way to do it wrong, and yet somehow, that makes doing it wrong almost inevitable. At every turn it feels like I look backwards to realize the path I took was only one of two that made up a fork in the road. Every decision feels like it’s at the expense of another.”
I’ve also been asked if this year has been what I expected it to be. My answer is no, but also that I’m not sure what I expected it to be, which are perhaps conflicting statements. But these past few months, with the halfway point of the year behind me, I was wrestling with these unmet and undefined expectations. I had to let go of the things I thought I might learn in each place, or at least the ways in which I thought I might learn them, in order to realize the things that I was learning. I ended up learning a lot about asking for help — help that took that form of advice, help that took the form of listening, and help that took the form of encouragement. I had this idea that the only way for this experience to be independent, was to carry it alone.
Over the past few months, I’ve met so many people whose resumes and job titles have impressed me - whose work leaves behind the footprint of deep care. But at the same time, many have embodied a spirit of “doing” and not “being.”
And sometimes, I think, these families need someone to be there with them, not just be there for them.
And while it’s easy to criticize — I’ll admit there are still areas in my life I hold myself to this rubric of measuring what I can do more than who I am.
This year has given me such a beautiful opportunity to learn things in a unstructured way. I think I’m finally at the point in the year where I’m appreciating the freedom, not just drowning in the ambiguity. In re-reading my first quarter letter, I realize how fixated I was on the lack of structure. I’ve made peace with as Elizabeth Gilbert and the Italians say, “the art of doing nothing.” I’m trying to remove the idea of “wasting time” from my vocabulary. There would be days shadowing at the hospital that felt like a failure when I went home without an insight — just another day, but I’m beginning to realize this year might be more than the sum of its parts. Someone told me before the fellowship began that if every day were a good day, it wouldn’t be a good year. But perhaps the inverse is also true. Even if every day fell short, it would still be a good year. I don’t mean to say that every day has, but I think so much of the beauty of this experience is found in it’s totality, not any one moment alone. No one day has changed me that much, but I can look back, and somehow, the change snuck up on me.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the end of this year looks like. Despite having booked a flexible ticket back home, it’s hard to fathom “going home.” It’s becoming hard to imagine a time where the bottom bunk of a hostel doesn’t have my name on it and my clothes don’t all rotate between mildly unclean in my oversized luggage.
Not because I can’t imagine what happens on the other side of this experience, but because I had this vision for who I would be on the other side of this. And the difference between who I am now and who I thought she would be then still seems so, well, different. I’ve become fixated on wanting to end this year in a different place (metaphorically) than I started it. That that would be the definition of success. But perhaps that’s just a softer way to trick myself into finding something that makes this year valuable on paper. (Don’t worry, I too am becoming frustrated with my hyper-fixation on productivity).
In a journal entry from the first week of Watson, I wrote, “All of it felt like it was building to that moment as I put on my black trousers and caught the train. I felt I was putting on a whole new Kaitlyn. There was going to be Kaitlyn before Watson and Kaitlyn after Watson and this was the day it began.”
When I re-read these early entries, they’re painted with a varnish of self-centered humility (though I may very well say the same thing looking back on this letter a year from now). The issue was I saw “Kaitlyn after Watson” as a person capable of different things. And though certainly this experience has equipped me with new skills and a newfound confidence, my potential has not changed nearly as much as my perspective.
And ironically, the more I learn, the more excruciatingly simple it all becomes — this notion of “caring over curing.” It’s both as hard and as easy as loving people who are hurting.