The bench is sturdy, built by my dad from the wood of my wife and I’s wedding arch, its home the shade under a thirty-year-old oak tree in my parents’ front yard. Tuesday, I found it mid-morning, in search of just the right place to drink coffee. Because some places are just better than others. And I needed to think.
Seconds after sitting down, I decided the bench was the best spot—in the whole county—and contentedly sipped my Guatemalan drip, black. I closed my eyes, listening to suburbia after the whole block vacated to work and school. An eerie quiet hovered with a lone noise echoing across the cul-de-sac; freed from their stems and descending to earth with reckless abandon, acorns bounded off windowsill, roof, and sidewalk. Their ground strikes were violent, ricocheting their shell shrapnel off my boots. Possessed by gravity, they fell so fast.
I opened my eyes, looked around my parents’ yard, and realized in an instant, what I hoped to never see: five years were gone, and I hadn’t been home.
When I left for California in 2018, I wasn’t aware of my entrance into a time machine.
On the surface, my motivations were sensical; to be a practicing physician, which I still hoped was a viable career, you realistically needed to complete a residency. And my residency position was in Orange County. But underneath, in the mysterious realm of the unconscious, I was fighting to find myself. Medical school had scrambled me up. So, when I said goodbye to my family, all my belongings in a six-by-ten Uhaul behind my truck, me and my dueling desires went west, praying for deliverance, unconsciously.
The first two years were turmoil. Any shreds of identity that made it to California were savaged by the sharks of medical training, leaving me frantic at California’s inability to deliver me back to myself. I tried hard those years though, coming in early to the hospital, doubling down on learning, and tripling down on surfing. But eventually, my dueling motivations broke me, and I washed up on the shores of a therapist’s couch, nearly drowned, but still breathing.
On that couch, I discovered something vital; I needed help. I had a situation in my hands—my desire to make being a physician work—that I simply could not figure out. How important and necessary this understanding was is hard to describe.
And from that very couch, things got better. My wife and I started dating. And throughout those years, I used my vacation days to come home, every two to three months like clockwork.
If there was one place where I saw the ghost of who I once was, it was with my family and friends in Oklahoma City. I needed to be back but when I was back, I wasn’t fully there. Sure, I hated seeing my cousins grow up without me being in their lives and hated watching my parents grow older with each year, but those changes and even more seismic shifts in my family, never fully registered. Something was in the way; I was unable to know this part of my life, unable to see what I was missing, because I didn’t even know the reason why I was missing it, out in California.
[convertkit form=3846822]
But between years three and four of the California experience, I started to put together what happened, how I arrived where I had, and began thinking about how to build a life after medicine. And learned, day by day, how to be myself again.
The tinted window obscuring an earnest view of my life began to roll down, and as I saw more and more, desperation appeared. Leaping into consciousness, I saw things changing. I had no dominion on time; the sands were slipping. And I could no longer live behind the tinted medicine window, living a life that wasn’t mine, and unable to see my life for what it was, without running the risk of terminal regrets.
One year ago tomorrow, this understanding was top of mind as I finished my last day in clinic; I wanted to live with the windows down. Honest. Open. Accountable.
And Tuesday, on my dad’s bench, the windows were all the way down, my life in the honest sun, untinted.
My basketball goal, affixed to my parents’ roof over the garage, was losing a battle with rust. My favorite restaurant from college, where the fried mushrooms were sacred, closed. My grandparents’ home different than it once was, grandpa’s energy transferred to taking care of grandma, just wasn’t the same. And my parents, in the absence of their only child, have developed incredible friendships, one of which was the reason I was in town, for that friend’s funeral.
A lot happened and a lot of it, I wasn’t present for, while lost in California.
This ached and continues to ache. So, I mourn. And hope, that in my time lost, to be found, I’ll reside as myself for the foreseeable future, living with the windows down, not missing a thing.
This week I published my first book. For a limited time, I’m giving away free copies to anyone who signs up for my newsletter. Join here, and I’ll email you a copy.
