Vacation Blues

Life update time.

There's about one and half months left until I graduate from residency. Doesn't time fly? I'm slightly dreading next week, where I'll be covering MICU night float for one week. But it's probably the last high-stress rotation of my residency until I enter fellowship. 

I've been on vacation for the past two weeks. Before that, I had two weeks of research. So in essence, I've essentially been just chilling for the past month. 

The first week of research was glorious. The Person was out of town visiting family, so I was alone with the cat for a week. I thrive in self-imposed structure. During that week, I was up before 7 AM every morning. I would do board exam prep questions and set a very specific daily goal for my research data collection. Usually I'd finish the first half of this goal by lunchtime. For an entire week I never broke my fast before lunchtime. For an entire week I cooked all my meals and didn't order take-out. After lunch was my "free-time" which I spent however I pleased. This included shopping, buying new houseplants and revamping my balcony garden, reading, and writing. Just before dinnertime, I would exercise with Ring Fit Adventure on my Nintendo Switch. Again, I cooked all my dinners. After, I would work on the second-half of my research daily goal until I finished, and then I would go to bed. 

This probably sounds fucking miserable to most people, but I was a happy camper during that week. I felt productive, I felt well-balanced and self-cared, I found joy in the company of my cat and plants. My favorite hours were in the morning when I would sit by the couch next to the window with my laptop and a pot of freshly brewed high-mountain loose leaf tea, and I would watch the light move, shining on my Maidenhair plant and two pots of cat-grass. 

The second week of research block was not nearly as productive, but it was still a happy one. I celebrated my 30th birthday. YY came to visit with her fiance, and we ate our way through southern California. There was a week of clinic in between that was truncated for scheduling reasons and relatively chill.

Then came my two weeks of vacation. 

I think there are several reasons for this, but when I think back to these past two weeks, I've been increasingly irritable and melancholy. I think the most obvious is the unavoidable knowledge that my "free time" is coming to an end. Other reasons likely include the social anxiety I battled with during my class retreat (which occurred during the first weekend of vacation). And I think the biggest thing is the pressure I've been putting on myself to write.

Writing is only sometimes fun. The majority of the time, it's like feeling constipated and trying to find an appropriate laxative. I've tried many techniques this past month. I bought an Alphasmart Neo2 (which actually worked pretty well when I needed to literally force shit out). I scribbled on a notepad. I messed with outlines, vignettes, free-writes. All of this was dedicated towards the still-untitled medicine rom-com.

Maybe it's not kosher to compare your own children, but my stories are not real children with feelings, so whatever. Med-Rom-Com has been a challenge because it hasn't occupied the enormous amount of headspace over time the way EP has. For one thing, because I stewed in EP for over a decade, most of the characters including secondary ones are full-fleshed people in my head. I know their motivations, can articulate their relationships with other characters. Meanwhile, I've been working on a scene between the hero/heroine, and I feel like I'm still trying to pin down their personalities and mannerisms. It gave me a newfound appreciation for what I'd managed to achieve with EP.

During this pandemic, I discovered the romance genre and have read a bucket-load of romance books. This includes a series called Immortals After Dark, courtesy of a podcast I randomly discovered called Fated Mates. Paranormal romance is not normally my cup of tea, but because I enjoy the episodes where the podcast hosts deep dive and analyze books on their show, I decided I would read the namesake series that the podcast is named after.

It's been an interesting experience. The podcast was created in 2018, so their discussions and analyses are from a current perspective. However, the early books in the IAD series were written in the mid-late 2000s. To give context, this is about the same time I first started writing EP as a high-schooler. It is actually quite fascinating to analyze how our attitudes towards relationships, whether heterosexual romantic or female-female rivals, has changed. The alpha-holes whose "protectiveness" of the heroines now come across as intolerably domineering. Slut-shaming other girls or women is no longer so acceptable or prevalent. 

Anyhoo. Today was the first time in over a year that I consciously returned to EP. I took a notepad and literally scribbled down the problem areas, any out-of-the-box changes that could be made, and what the domino effects of these changes would lead to. Vacation's almost over, but I think if anything, my struggles with Med-Rom-Com have helped me realize that it still needs to stew in daydreams a bit longer. In a reversal, I might just end up taking another crack at EP. Now that I've been emotionally distanced from it for over a year, I'll probably be much less precious about hacking away the parts that don't work anymore.