To become a doctor, it required I study. To study subjects I didn’t want to study, it required I mainline coffee until my right eyelid twitched. To obtain a daily caffeine dose capable of curing ADHD, I became a regular at the city’s coffee shops.
Still, come late afternoon, my attention would beg for relief from the hippocratic monotony. My typical escape was a neighboring conversation; I listened desperately to many—most involving two women talking exclusively about a guy who just wasn’t that into one of them. But aside from those, I remember only one.
“Thanks for asking. She’s doing better,” the pastor said to his friend. I’d been eavesdropping for half a cup of Columbian and half a page of embryology, learning his wife was struggling since their transfer to a new church. “She’s finding herself,” he offered tepidly before conclusion. “And she just died her hair pink, seeming happier since.”
Oh shit, I thought, spitting fifty cents of my coffee back into its cup. This woman’s not okay.
You see, I’d just shaved my own head, and I was not “doing better”. I had a $200,000-lifelong-commitment-sized-career-and-identity problem in my lap, and I’d tried to absolve it by shaving my head. I feared this woman had a similar problem.
In the eight years since, my caffeine level is once again humane, my right eyelid stopped twitching, and my hair is a healthy length. All because I stopped doing something I never wanted to do and addressed my problem. I don’t know what happened to the pastor’s wife, but if she’s still dying her hair, I hope it’s because she wants to, and not because she needs to.
To livin’ a life we love,
Ryan Fightmaster, MD
