9/15/26
I am discouraged. I had my SFOM exam and realized the corruption has tendrils extending all the way to the base of medicine. I wanted some pure challenge. Some free avenue for obsession to consume me. But all I found was another branch to waste away my life. Another turn down a hopeless path. I did nothing but sleep for the last 4 days, and now w a mountain of work looming over me, I am still waiting for the vigor to fill my chest. This reminds me of a conclusion I came to during last year’s winter madness–that advice is a futile venture. It falls on deaf ears desperately vying to hear more. But the feelings themselves are the end. A tornado or maelstrom of snow and ice spin beneath my irises. They cloud my vision. I want Ava. I want to hold her. I want to sleep in her soft golden hair. To feel her gentle breathing–the rise and fall of her chest. But I am left bereft. A cold throbbing in my thorax. An empty bubbling of blood. A penumbra of fading hate flowing behind me. I can feel my eyes sting, and I want to escape. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know where I am going. And I am doubtful, that any destination actually exists. I am doubtful that there is anything but smiling lies to keep the world turning under the heat of an ugly sun. Cracks, crevices, and crumbling cornices begin to characterize my face.
I don’t know what to wish for.
I saw a video of 2 men riding a 4-wheeler in the Ukraine. In an instant the man on the back was falling over the driver’s thoracic cavity and slipping into a ditch.
What to do. What to think. What to believe. I am being brainwashed. It is by design. They don’t call it that in their meetings. But their motives are no less nefarious.
I wish I weren’t ugly. I wish I still had hope.
I think….maybe….in spite of them….I build something beautiful. Maybe….if I want to…..I can imagine something beautiful…and operate independently of their regime.
What tormented him was that he had begun to take pride in his exhaustion. He despised the school for consuming his life, yet when another student confessed to sleeping eight hours, he felt a small, filthy satisfaction—as though suffering were a qualification and he had earned more of it. Was this why he had wished to become a physician? To sit beside the sick with a secret ledger of his own sacrifices? Yesterday he had hurried past a woman crying outside the hospital because he was late for a lecture on compassion. He could have stopped; that was the unbearable thing. No one had actually forbidden him. And yet he wanted someone to have forbidden him, wanted it desperately, for then his cowardice would belong to the institution, and he could go on hating it with a clean conscience.