hello my pretty protozoa,

phew! life has been a lot (when is it not??) 

this is a back dated newsletter – I wrote most of it but didn't send bc I was overwhelmed with medicine. so enjoy it & know that you will hear from me again soon :)

I'm currently on week 6 of the 8 week medicine clerkship. holy cow! I have a lot a lot to say about all that I've experienced and learned & how it may inform my praxis going forward. I love caring for patients. I'm enjoying learning more about the human machine & all the ways things can go wrong & what to do when it happens. 

for now, I want to talk about how different the experience is from Before.the first thing I noticed after a few days on the wards was how much easier it was to exist in that space without the nagging voice of SI. It is clear to me how acutely traumatized I was during the February-early May period of this year. I look back at my experience in the neurology clerkship completely different since returning and not spending most moments fighting The Voice. where did it go? how did it get there in the first place?

one day during leave, I was laying on a blanket on Lake Union in Seattle, journaling while Elissa paddle boarded (then we switched), and I was thinking about Burn Out. People talk about this all the time, in physician/scientist spaces a lot. I think it means different things to different people, and my goal for that journaling session was to figure out what it means to me. If I conceptualize myself as a point in 2 dimensional space where x is time in seconds and y is state of being*, then different things can change both the sign (positive versus negative) and the value of my state at a given moment. From there, I came up with rainbow colored categories of “flags” – things that impact how my point is doing in space and what can be done to make it better (or worse 🙃). Writing all these things out helped me figure out what I need to do to recharge and to stay charged + things that indicate I'm not doing so hot and should pay attention.

*ok this in itself has its own semi function to define it that I waiver on, typically though I define as {mental, physical, emotional} type shit. it's also very related to the window of tolerance model… lots to unpack.

**further, less fleshed out: the impact of meteors (ie Traumas) on the function. these are like (-) black holes, not pictured in this diagram that change the center of gravity of the point in space. maybe?

all this to say, I started the clerkship strongly in the purple from my time off. I continue to be proud of myself for fighting for what I needed. Every week takes more out of me and I am not as “well” as when I started but every weekend I try to do as many blue and purple things as I can, so that I can be ready for the next week.

though we are still wrapping up the first season, I am excited to announce the theme of the next season!

> what is healing? <

as some of y'all may know, I sometimes get fixated on a question then I ask it to everyone. for a little over a year now, I've been thinking about this question. it started with a prompt/theme from the Weill Cornell literary journal and tumbled into me owning my strengths as a healer and struggling with the reality that many if not most aspects of med school and medicine are not Healing. [SMAU season 1] will reflect the models I have learned about on my journey so far & of course, the wonderful humans who taught them to me.

The playlist bringing me love & joy & comfort in these TRYING times comes from the incredible Maeve Riney, her Sunday Morning playlist. We used to burn CDs for each other and listening to this feels like singing in Maeve’s car (rip the kia).

NEW EPISODE TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10TH!!!! at long last, we hear from Rachel work towards the end of season 0.

love & light,

meg