You know the vibe: essential oils diffusing through the air, dreadlocked employees, and a flyer board for local healers and artists. This is what I saw last Saturday afternoon as I crossed the threshold into our local health food store. As I took it all in, scanning the arrangements of beeswax candles next to fresh lion’s mane mushrooms, I noticed a flyer to my right advertising “Astrocartography” services. Amused, I scanned it briefly, where this person was claiming to know if Asheville was the right geophysical location for you and your journey. I looked at my wife and said, “Look at this shit.” She shook her head, not amused by my condescension, and deserted me for the cold sandwich bar.
See, this is why I don’t like these places, just a bunch of bullsh…
But before my conclusion fully fused, I remembered. Flush through every cell in my body came the feeling of home I used to feel in stores just like this. I remembered Mana Foods on Maui with the best tofu sandwiches in the world. I remembered The Earth in Norman, where I’d voyage during medical school for a hearty vegan meal inside Oklahoma’s plant-based Siberia. I remembered when I used to love these places with all my heart.
And then, I remembered what happened to me and the health food store, how a passion went astray, twisted by compromise, and became something entirely else, something a lot like hate.
Following after my wife to the cold sandwich bar, I located a premade croissant stuffed with curried chicken and locally sprouted greens. I chose this sandwich because it was the only non-vegan item at the bar. I was hungry. I wanted to be satiated. And it was incredible. Even though my veganism had ended five years prior, it did still feel sacrilegious to eat meat in a health food store, so when my yearning stomach asked for something else to eat, I selected the tempeh wrap, stuffed with you guessed it: locally sprouted greens.
Eating my tempeh wrap, watching patrons enter giddily through the front door, I wondered what happened to us, me and the health food store. For a place that was once undeniably my place, how had we fallen out?
When you identify as vegan—as I did from 2012 to 2017—the health food store is a religious institution. Selling an endless hope of health enhancement, I never missed a sermon, paying homage to one temple of aliveness or another weekly for groceries. My way of life was accepted there. I found myself in those groceries and in those cashier conversations. As I’d leave, with a new food or supplement, I thought anything was possible in my life. It was a panacea of possibility.
I was twenty-three years old, working for a non-profit, trying out veganism because it sounded like a fun challenge, and running marathons. My life, before medical school, was a curious one of becoming. And I loved my life; thus, I loved the health food store too.
When I went to medical school, I thought I’d be able to keep that aliveness and for the first few years, I did. I traveled to Maui, learned to surf, and kept eating plant-based, seemingly without cost to my soul. When I went to a health foods store, anywhere, it still gave me the feels. But when you make a compromise on knowing—I knew I never wanted to be a doctor—the piper has to get paid, and by the time I arrived in California for residency, I was no longer living a life of curious becoming and no longer vegan and no longer infatuated with the health food store. At the hands of medical school, I’d also become an evidence-based cynic.
The health food store slowly became a monument to what I’d lost: myself. When I was inside those stores of wafting essential oils, watching vibrant cashiers chat enthusiastically about beet root extract and alkaline water, I hated everything about it. And I hated that twenty-three-year-old vegan me that had let me go to medical school and didn’t have the courage to go after what he wanted. The health food store and that twenty-three-year-old me had failed me.
I thought, in my delusion of omnipotent control, that my soul could survive medicine if I just doubled down on my previous passions. If I just stay vegan, if I just keep running, if I just keep going to the health food store, I’ll be okay.
But over the years, one by one, I watched every one of those passions die as my delusion led me deeper and deeper into medicine. Until finally, a year and a half ago, I came face-to-face with my compromise and admitted that nothing could make medicine tenable for me. That I couldn’t even make medicine tenable for me.
Because it wasn’t me.
Before my wife convinced me to eat lunch at the health food store, I’d had a massage—my first in four years. While the masseuse worked through years of muscular tension, her hands unloaded memories before my eyes. Flashing images of my past rolled by like a medical school and residency yearbook, as I remembered myself anxious inside the psychiatric emergency department, frantic while studying for board exams, and yelling angrily in my after call shifts. I watched these memories appear, then disappear, while others emerged and dissolved as the massage went on. I just watched them play.
After it was over, I was in a waiting room designed to allow for decompression after the massage, when I saw a book on a wooden shelf lining the couch. It was Perfect Health by Deepak Chopra. I’d read it fourth year of medical school, in the months before I left for California, as I tried to treat my growing anxiety and depression. I used to love that book too, until it met the same fate as my other passions, and I came to loathe the idea of that book. But on the couch, skimming its pages, all I felt was gratitude. Tears welled. I still loved the idea of health and healing and self-empowerment. I still loved the twenty-three-year-old who chose to go to medical school. And I still wanted to heal.
After a debrief with the masseuse, who told me my chest was holding significant tension and offered a list of stretching exercises, I walked across the street to the library and checked out Perfect Health.
Looking at the collection of vegan mayo and tempeh and tomato juice that had settled in the bottom of my wrap’s tortilla, I squeezed together that final bite and placed it in my mouth. I watched the cashier holding conversation with the locals, talking excitedly about their products, and cracking jokes. I took a deep inhale of the essential oils, collected the wrappers that once held the vanquished chicken sandwich and vegan wrap as my wife signaled she was ready to go. On the way out, right before I stepped out the door, that Astrocartography poster caught my eye again. I stopped, stayed a minute to read more about the subject, and then stepped over the threshold, smiling.
Now available on Kindle, you can purchase my first book 32 Lessons from 8 Years Lost in Medicine. For all the support since its launch, I cannot thank everyone enough. Let’s keep on livin’ a life we love.
(Photo Caption: Yes, that is my astrocartography map. No, I do not yet know what it means. If you’d like one too, here’s a free link.)
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This is a fantastic post! Thank you for sharing this story with us all. It makes me wonder, how did you choose psychiatry as your specialty? What about it attracted you (or repelled you the least, maybe)? How do you see all of your medical training and experience caring for people in that particular way, integrating into you life hereafter? Best wishes to you, and looking forward to following your journey further! 🙂
Catherine, I appreciate your sincerity and questions. I chose psychiatry because when I compared it to the other specialties, it had the most heart. At least for me. Consciously, I liked the idea of longitudinal relationships and transformation inside therapy. Unconsciously, I hoped the specialty would help me figure myself out! I’d been depressed during third year of medical school, and I was just drawn to the field. As far as how it may integrate into my future life, I know I’ll always be a psychiatrist. There’s no undoing that! Jokes aside, going to medical school and doing a psychiatry residency has been the biggest blessing of my life. It’s helped me accept others and myself. And it’s helped me be more honest. As far as where that goes, time will have to tell!
Ryan, thank YOU for your honesty and willingness to engage with the questions! How insightful and inspiring. I am fully confident that though you will not practice as a licensed psychiatrist, you will help many people with your expertise and knowledge, as well as your empathy and compassion. Onward!