Portraits of Boston

I haven’t been in Boston since July 2018, and I miss it so much just as I miss many of you. I hope you all are hanging on, and I hope to see you soon.

“We've been holding hands all day today, and I was telling him earlier how different the feeling is here. When you’re holding hands here, you get smiles. If you’re doing it in the South, you get stares.”  

“I came to the US for a summer vacation when I was a kid, and I remember telling myself that one day I would come back here to live, study, or work. I felt that I fit in here, with people who didn’t speak my first language, more than I did in a place where I was supposed to belong. I never fit in there, but I didn’t feel trapped until my twenties. Getting out was hard. I couldn’t get a passport or travel abroad without permission from my male legal guardian. It was a battle, and I sacrificed having a home, and a nice job, and being from an upper-class family for the freedom to do what I want and to take my life into my hands. But there are other girls like me there who are still trapped, who can’t do what they want, who can’t leave their house without being judged or manipulated. So, I’m out, but part of me is still there. But even once I got here, it was still a struggle. I’m a medical school graduate, but I’m trying to specialize in anesthesia here. It was a 3-year struggle just to get accepted into a residency program. At one point, I thought I didn’t have a chance here.” “Why anesthesiology?” “I like being in the operating room. I used to do some acting back in my country. I love the stage, and I think it’s funny how, in hospitals, they also call the operating room the ‘theater.’ We have to wear a certain costume—we all wear scrubs. We have ceiling-mounted theater lights for the surgeons to see, and everyone has a role there. You don’t get into the operating room unless you have a role. And we have to be a team to make it work. I also like putting patients to sleep and taking their pain away. Anesthesia was first publicly done here in Boston, in Mass General Hospital. There is a dome that you can visit, called the ‘Ether Dome,’ where in 1846 doctors and students sat on the gallery to watch as a dentist gave a patient an inhaler with ether. He went unconscious, and after the surgery, the patient woke up without remembering anything. So I find it fateful that I’m pursuing my anesthesia career in the city where anesthesia was first publicly demonstrated. I also like that I work with new doctors and new patients every day, rather than seeing the same patient over and over again like doctors who might have the same patient with diabetes for 15 years. You say goodbye, end of the story. And then there’s another story. I like that. Short stories, not a novel.”

“My third child just graduated from high school. In America, most kids have a graduation party. My husband and I didn’t want to do that, so we asked her if she wanted a graduation party or a solo trip with just mom and dad. She chose the trip. We live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and we went to Martha’s Vineyard. My daughter is named after my husband’s grandmother, who died on the Egypt Air flight that was taken down off of Nantucket about twenty years ago. There is a memorial in Rhode Island, and we went to see it. So I’m just sitting here thinking about it all—from my husband’s grandparents, who perished tragically, to my daughter, who is about to go out into the world.” “Do your two older children go to the University of Michigan?” “My oldest one did get into the University of Michigan, but he chose not to go there. He wanted to live abroad, so he is attending the University of Amsterdam. And my second son went on a gap year that he spent in Tanzania and Nepal. Now he also wants to go to school abroad, so he is leaving tomorrow for Prague.” “You’ve raised unconventional children—adventurers and explorers.” “I appreciate you saying that, because I do want them to take unconventional paths. As Americans, we tend to think very narrowly and do the same thing as everyone else. But that’s never appealed to me. I think people are more interesting when they screw up, jump off the path, do something or go somewhere different, learning from other people. So I constantly urge them, ‘Go, go, go!”

He was a theoretical physicist, so I suspected that he had had a knack for science from an early age. “Not at all,” he said. “I was still undecided even in high school. Then, in the 11th grade, we had to choose a direction--humanities or STEM. I chose humanities. But then, in the summer, I did some preparatory school, and I went to the math teacher, who started teaching me about trigonometric equations. He put the whole thing in such a context that it made a lot of sense to me. He would show me a card with an equation, and I would look at it and say, ‘Hmm, so the solution is this, right?’ And then he would show me another one, and another one, and I would solve each of them in my head and then give him the solution. He called the other math teacher and said, ‘Hey, come here to see this phenomenon!’ And I felt so inspired, because someone made me feel like I wasn’t an idiot. It’s not that the equations were so difficult, or that I was really a phenomenon. It’s just that someone, for the first time, had behaved as if I wasn’t stupid. Until that point, everyone else had always acted as if I was stupid. And if all of the teachers treat you like you’re stupid, you’re going to end up thinking that you really are stupid. I find that most people have been discouraged by bad experiences that they’ve had with bad teachers. They went to high school and perhaps found out that they were really stupid in the subjects of math or science. And when I ask them why, they say, ‘Well, because I couldn’t do the exercises.’ But when I ask whether they could remember why they couldn’t do the exercises, most of the time it turns out that they either had no guidance, or that the way they were taught was so stifling, so boring. The fact is, most people are not stupid, because they are creative and productive with their lives, and that’s all the intelligence you need even to do theoretical physics. There are, of course, the exceptional few who are geniuses, but there aren’t enough geniuses to populate the entire world of science. We need more than one in a million people in order to successfully do science. The rest of the scientists who aren’t geniuses are just like you and me. There’s nothing more to it.”

“When I was ten years old, my friends made a video about me and posted it on YouTube. The video made fun of my nationality and other personal things, saying that I was disgusting and that the world would be better off without me. They said a lot of very hurtful things in the video, like, ‘We hate you. Kill yourself.’ Because I was so young, and because they were my best friends, I thought that maybe they were right, and that I really was an awful and disgusting person.”

“I have a chemical imbalance in my brain, and I’m not embarrassed by it. But if I were to describe myself in a thousand words, ‘mentally ill’ wouldn’t be something that I would include.”

“I feel like a lot of people graduate from college just for themselves. But I have so many other people counting on me. I hope I don’t disappoint them.”  

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“I’ve never been in love, and I’m scared of it.” “Why is that?” “Because you have to open up and share yourself completely with someone else. It’s a scary thought, letting someone know who you really are.”