Collapse Into Now

Let me explain how I ended up here again.

I am a week and a half into my emergency medicine rotation, enjoying my day off after a 12-hour day shift. Time is a strange concept for me these days. Terrifying things loom over the horizon -- applications, personal statements, asking people for letters of recommendation. Things I know I shouldn't put off, and yet things I don't want to think about. And so, in these odd days when I don't have to go to the hospital... I write.

I write like a fever, because I can hear the clock ticking down. If I don't revise and polish up EP into a draft I can live with by next summer, two things will happen: 1) I will become busy as a hell once I enter residency, and 2) I may very well give up on this project altogether. Can you imagine trying to sustain enthusiasm for the same project for over ten years? This has become especially clear to me since finishing the first draft last winter. I have days when I am absolutely destroyed by self-doubt, when I think about all the ugly parts of the story that are still huge chunky slabs of blah that I still haven't polished down and refined, and when I think about the enormity of what I still have to do, all I want to do is just forget about this project altogether. The saving grace is that there are days when I read through that messy draft and reach those crucial scenes I'd dreamed about writing since I was sixteen, and I remember that this is the story I've wanted to write for nearly half my life.

But back to how I ended up here. I write with music playing in the background. The type of music varies wildly; I have been especially partial to the Wonder Woman soundtrack as of late. (Maybe one of these days, when I am procrastinating, I will write about the Wonder Woman movie or about the Badass One's rumored suicide attempt. Those are topics that have dwelled on my mind as of late.)

Today, I let my music player shuffle through my computer's entire MP3 collection at random. Talk about a stroll down memory lane. My MP3 collection encompasses a specific set of years in my life, ranging from middle school when MP3 players first became a thing, to my college years when people started moving towards music streaming via Spotify.

The song "Blue" by R.E.M. came on. I wrote a short story for class during college: a Bluebeard retelling that revolved around those lyrics. I looked up the lyrics and was struck by the beauty in its poetic sparseness. I realized how it's been a while since I looked up lyrics. I used to do it all the time, when I would snip verses and paste them into blog posts. I came back to this blog and specifically hit the "lyrics" tag. I read my post inspired by "The Ocean" by Mae and was stunned to realize I had completely forgotten about an incident during middle school that had me floating like a balloon. I read the lyrics to "W.A.Y.S." by Jhene Aiko and remember how I felt when I learned about a suicide by a medical student in the year below me.

It's been a while since I reread my old posts. I read Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur recently. The poems reminded me of my old blog posts, and at the time, I wondered if my old blog would embarrass me the way my old Xanga had. Surprisingly, not really. There are some clunky phrases here and there, but I am struck more by how well I can remember how I felt when I reread my words.

Truthfully, I don't think I will be blogging here more often this year, despite that this year will be similar to my gap year, when I had more free time as I applied to medical school. The goal for me is clear---to polish up EP to the point that I am ready to query before next summer. It's all on me now.