angry

At the United States border, driving from Montreal Canada, a friendly man with a Southern drawl asks us where we lived, where we were coming from, what we did, and what we were doing. When I tell him we're students in Connecticut, he asks what we were studying. "Medicine." A slight grimace, and "...Why?" We break into real laughter, not of the oh-you're-funny sort, but of the oh-you're-right kind. "We've been wondering that the whole drive here."

I'm generally not that negative about the harder, less ideal aspects of medicine, mostly because 1) I keep hoping that we'll fight against them, and 2) even when that fails, I feel lucky to meet such variety of people, to witness and understand subtle individual qualities, to get strands of stories even as most are still wound tight. But this doesn't mean that I don't see the shortfalls of what we've seen of medicine, though I do worry that my modes of adapting to or coping with them will lead to passivity and unawareness.

Anyway, I get disconcerted and quietly mad throughout the days. Most days I see it and think about it and tuck it away, for storage and memory and recall and change. This keeps me sane, and optimistic even as I try to stay open to how that optimism may pan out (ie, it may not). Some days it's much harder; while the mad remains quiet, it's noticeably present to me and it gets to the point where hope gives way to worry and slight depression about why things are this way. A friend of mine who saw with me some of the saddest parts of medicine I've seen, asked me the other week to explain my distinction between sadness and depression. There's probably a lot to it that I feel and haven't yet expressed, but the best I could do at the time was that--I find sadness in loss that is natural, whereas unnatural loss brings depression. Disease and death is sad; injustice and undue unkindness or undue absence of kindness (more common than the former), depresses me. This hole amidst a profession of caretaking can really get to us sometimes.

At times like this I look around for the ground that we're supposed to stand in; at this point in our venture I don't mind if it's grass sunken from continuous downpour, if it's uneven pebbles that uncomfortably dig, even fresh tar that traps. But then there are those moments I look and there. is. nothing. We reach and reach, and we're left drifting in some two-dimensional space where the ground of taking care has been replaced with simple blank.

What to make of this, at the end of a day when I don't want to be helplessly angry? As with other modes of sustaining positivity, I'm not completely sure but hope that--in this fury we'll throw wide heavy blocks at this wall with no floor.