oh baby.

That’s a quarter of a century! It feels like a long time, and I’m feeling a little concerned that I haven’t accomplished anything in that time? I have friends who have done monumental things like get married, go to med school, buy a house, compete in the Olympics, graduate from law school, etc in that time span.

But when I was 16, I never thought I would make it past age 22. That seemed like a cut off year, and everything was so terrifying and overwhelming that I couldn’t possibly stay alive past age 22. It sounds really stupid and artificial now, but at the time, I was having panic attacks every other day and mixing tylenol with alcohol. The void that I imagined after 22 seemed very real and unavoidable.

And yet, here I am! I don’t feel very accomplished, but I’m pretty happy these days. I used to be afraid of everything, but now I am less so. I used to be afraid of driving, but two weeks ago I drove from San Jose to Fremont in the rain while in cosplay LOL. I used to be afraid of making small talk with strangers, but I have conversations with dozens of patients a day now. Most of all, I used to be afraid of standing my ground, but I’ve learned to confront both strangers and loved ones on things that I find non-negotiable. I wouldn’t say I’m very good at it, and I’d like be more authoritative, but I’m working on it. 

I’d like to go into 25 with the idea of being even less afraid in mind. There’s so many things I haven’t tried and so many experiences that I’ve turned down because I’ve been afraid. I want to learn how to use a sewing machine so that I don’t have to ask other people to machine sew my cosplays for me. I want to reach out to more girls in the cosplay community because I admire their work and want to make more female friends. I want to get the merit scholarship in my post-bac program and ask questions at work medical meetings and get back into playing piano and have better posture. I want to work hard with my classmates and truly, genuinely cheer them on without any shadow of envy or jealousy for their success, because I don’t want to fear that their success equates with my failure. 

None of these things are a law school degree, or a spot in the Olympics. But to me, the effort and faith required to accomplish these things - or to even have the mindset required to achieve these things - means being brave enough to try. To me, that is moving mountains. 

1. it’s been a while

2. starting over on a very long and tedious dream

3. i really love making money

4. i’m in school again

5. it upsets me that i’ve always considered myself bad at chemistry (as in, the academic subject)

1. Pentatonix’s “Cheerleader” cover

2. matcha brick toast with chocolate ice cream

3. “see you soon” rather than goodbye

4, Mamamoo’s Wheein’s performance of “Short Hair”

some nights i stay up biting the skin around my thumbs up to my knuckles until they’re raw and ragged and bleeding because if i stop i might turn my attention towards the red wine in the fridge and the homemade crabapple vodka in the dining room and the cabinets full of antidepressants and painkillers, and i’m afraid of working up an appetite for them all at once 

i’m jealous of you and i miss you. you were brave enough to show feelings and be sad and tell people about it, and i’m on the cusp of the next step into the dream career i’ve always wanted but i can’t even stop biting my thumbs. 

and academic language - no contractions, perfectly proofread grammar - can’t capture the ferocity with which his brother snarled at me when i nervously told him that the nursing facility was very expensive, because don’t i know that he deserves a palace to live in when he can’t be safe in his own mind, that $15,000 a month is nothing at all to a blue-collar worker with three children, so long as his brother doesn’t crack open his head again on the glass window, so long as he goes to bed clean every night, who let him stay in the wet bedclothes anyway for a whole 8 hours, and he will cling to his brother’s personhood when everyone thought it was lost when the schizophrenia came at age 15, induced, they said, by the epilepsy treatments 

and how insufficient of you to tell me that i don’t deserve to be a doctor, that i am not smart enough when i remember the mingling shame, guilt, and most of all - the worst of all - fear that i felt and fought when the homeless, nameless, friendless man wandered into the hospital, and i took the shoes off his feet, wounds oozing blood in black and green and blue, and his dirty, scabbed fingers brushed against my cheek and i thought, less fleetingly than i like to admit, what if he just gave me a disease, as if i’m better than him just because the world turns at best a blind eye to his kind, you ming, liu lang han, the kind that even the social workers sigh at exasperatedly 

and i will never forget walking past rows and rows of beds in the ER, overflowing out onto the street, the expecting mother, 7 months pregnant but the motorcycle crash has caused her to no longer have the ability to take care of her baby; the woman, so desperate to die that she beat her head into the tile bathroom wall in front of us, who knew that such a small body could make that kind of sound and power; the thud of a body that had fallen - no, leaped - from the 10th floor ward, how the entire campus had woken up and how her daughter sobbed; the husband who screamed at me and made the other intern cry because his wife, unconscious, had swallowed fertilizer after their argument the previous night; the little girl, barely out of middle school, shrieking in fear as they collected evidence for the rape kit, and her father roared and her mother cried with her; how i felt i was performing the greatest act of violation when i snapped pictures of the young wife’s bruises, all stretched across her abdomen, shoulders, and throat, so that i could put the evidence in a file that was to be taken to court

and then you ask me if i want to go into medicine for the prestige, for the way people look at you with respect and admiration. 

it works like so: first you find your blades, long ignored but never forgotten and always, always sharp. then, because you are a scientist and because you know you are smarter than people give you credit for, you wipe everything down with alcohol wipes. it’s not the medical-grade iodine/ethanol repeated wipes that you used when you were learning how to perform surgeries, but we can’t always be safely tucked away from the world in a lab. hope that your most recent tetanus shot is recent enough, because cuts are clean, but infections are gross. wipe your skin clean. feel dirty anyways.

cut one on the upper arm, because you can’t think of a better place. across the ribs hurt too much, and you’re clumsy because you can’t see or reach well there. legs? you like shorts too much, and it’s summer. but your work uniform covers your upper arm, so that’s where you choose. nothing really happens, because it’s your first time cutting in years, and you’re no longer brave enough to cut as deeply as possible. you go across the same line again, even though you’re really not supposed to do that. you used to perform dozens of surgeries a week, snipping through skin and connective tissue and muscle, clamping blood vessels and tying sutures like it was arts and crafts. remember the control you had back then. there’s none of that now. 

blood dribbles out on cut three. there are even lines of different degrees of red, and it’s a little pretty. and familiar. it matches the faint white lines, still there years later, under your wrist. you keep going until the blood threatens to spill out of control and you run out of paper towels with which to clean it up. bile and a horrific suffocating feeling starts to build up in your esophagus, a combination of gastroesophageal reflux - they screamed at you through your dinner, so you ate too fast - and the full bottle of tylenol you took in order to calm yourself into doing this. 

because you ran out of paper towels, grab your pajamas off the floor and press it to your arm. hold it there and apply pressure. the last thing you do - because your priorities are all in the right place, of course - is make a mess. you’ve made enough of those. the bleeding doesn’t stop. apply more pressure. feel only a little bit of alarm because everything healed fine last time this happened. a part of you wishes you won’t be so lucky again, but you’ve read about what it’s like to die from bleeding out, and it seems far too ugly and painful for the effort. your goal is clean, but blood droplets on your floor and chair show that you’ve failed again. 

eventually - faster than you think, anyway - the bleeding calms down. when you remove your stained pajama pants, some of the thread fibers have stuck to the wound. as you pull the fabric away, everything threatens to open again. it never does. that’s all anything is, anyway - a threat. threatening to kill yourself, threatening to die. threatening to end it all. but every suicide letter you’ve ever written has gone unused and expired because you’re too afraid to fulfill that promise to yourself.