we're in kansas now

So intern year has started, and I never got around to transitioning from this blog to another. Even though I'm on a very light month right now, there are still a lot of competing priorities for my free time to balance. I've been focused on doing a lot, rather than processing, which is too bad because this month has been great in its emphasis on giving things thought. I'm planning on backtracking short thoughts on each past day of this rotation, which I've never actually done because it seems so daunting to go back while continuing to move forward, but I don't want to forget these feelings.

Before that--this is a halfhearted effort to wind down this blog, which contains the first of my public journals from college and then a transition to this space sometime during med school. This makes me think of an ongoing effort to make my new home home by burning a candle I've sentimentally kept for several years. It's encased in a jar, and I'd like to fill the jar with other sentimental keepsakes, and to do so I have to burn the candle inside down. I've been taking showers by candlelight, falling asleep to candlelight, cooking dinner to candlelight. Candles burn for a long while.

At one point I wanted to write about graduation, which is now about two months past. Even as I get excited for them, I never like my graduations. They're always rushed, inadequate, and leave more emptiness than fulfillment. It's also rained on my last two of three. It's no one's fault really that graduations are this way. There's just too much to be contained in that amount of space. This year during graduation, I got laryngitis and lost my voice. This actually really depressed me. I'm grateful though that my kind advisor opened her home to my family and me, and that I was sick in a comfortable home. And for my awesome friend who drove out to this home to bring me lunch and chamomile tea. Dealing with the stresses of physically moving and emotionally graduating, on top of feeling drained of the energy and resource needed to deal with them, was pretty crappy. My family was very supportive, but I don't think families have a sense of what graduation is for the graduate, and I felt a little alone in the difficulty of those moments.

But, I'm reminded that while graduation is supposed to be representative of what comes before, what I take isn't that representation but the actual substance of what came before. After the laryngitis, I developed what I've grown to habitually develop after any sort of cold--a chronic cough that keeps me up at night. This particular one was the worst I'd ever had; it could have me dry heaving, and coughing for an hour straight, and in physical pain from the strain. It's mostly gone now, though it'll come back in lesser degrees when I'm tired or worn or anxious.

In some ways, I've adjusted to this being the way graduations are meant to be (now that I'll never have one again)--painful in visceral ways, your body aware of a real movement, and feelings that overwhelm to the point that you can't digest any one sense. It's a lot, and instead of forcing yourself to handle it, it can be easier to let yourself be vulnerable to being overtaken. And grow more comfortable with the very gradual falling into place of things.

I've had to adjust to giving a lot of things more time. Moving, and settling. I didn't find an apartment until I started internship, and it stressed me for a little while to not be set up before I started work. But M said, why not just let it happen slowly. And since I didn't have much practical choice in that, I let go of my personal need to have everything in place before starting this new stage. Sometimes things don't align at the edges, and so I'm grateful for every step in home-making even as it coincides with a step in doctoring. It was only a couple days ago that I recycled all my boxes. I still don't have a dresser, so my clothes are piled in the closet and across the shelf that lines my room. But I do have plants and a couch and chair and dining table and one picture hung. The day after I moved in, I realized that a shower curtain was a real necessity, and I set up my bathroom soon after that, with my favorite item in the apartment so far, a rug that's green soft in color and texture and feels so good under my feet after a shower.

Also, it took me a long time and much neurotic decision-making to get this apartment. The housing market was even more insane than usual this year. I thought hard about a couple apartments; one I finally decided against, another that I decided for but didn't get. In classic this-is-my-life, the one I finally got is amazingly better than either of those. So when I worry about living among a lot of half-unpacked things, I look at where those half-unpacked things are and feel extremely lucky for this space.

My apartment is on Kansas Street. When I first learned the address, I had a funny feeling that the fitting name would make it mine...in the way that I think both that things work out in a cosmic sense and that I make it seem to cosmically fit. But after all those thoughts about how coming home hasn't really felt like home, it feels right to say, well I actually AM in Kansas now. It's that feeling that this former home that feels foreign to me is now my home again. I named my wireless network NewHaven, and all these havens are congealing and I know this melding process takes time to seal. I think it's this stitching that keeps everything so close, but leaves me open to what's coming.

So--new blog.