The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
At some point in the last few months, without ceremony or consent, I became the most responsible person in my family. There was no coronation. Responsibility in families obeys a conservation law: it never disappears, it just migrates toward whoever flinches last. My parents are getting old and fretful. My brother, now that med school has stopped supplying its ambient excitement, is possibly mildly depressed, and his relationship of five years has come apart in his hands. Seeing it coming didn't dull the pain.
All of which culminated in my vacation falling apart, and me frantically darning it back together. He didn't apply for his visa in time; then, at our parents' gentle nudging, he postponed the whole thing to September. How kind of everyone involved. It's not as if I needed that vacation myself. I was fucking counting on those two weeks to undo several months of pure misery, which, granted, is a lot to ask of two weeks. I was asking anyway.
So I coped. I spent time in Glasgow, which I've warmed to; I can see myself living there in the long run, and God knows the demand for psychiatrists exists. I went to Loch Lomond, which is absolutely gorgeous, and overrun with tourists trailing dogs and small children, a combination calculated to make my heart ache. I ended up in Pitlochry, realized I'd left my keys behind, and did something I'd always meant to do and never had: backpacking.
Or an approximation thereof. I crashed at a hostel, despite being able to afford an actual hotel without checking my balance. Mixed experience. The kids were all on their phones. I looked comprehensively out of place, dressed in work-adjacent clothing and boots never designed for hiking. I could not have given less of a fuck.
I didn't sleep well. My bunkmate has an INCREDIBLY clingy nephrologist girlfriend, who began video calling him at eight in the morning. Ringer on. He slept through it. I did not. She kept this up for fifty minutes, per my watch. I silenced several calls. I tried to shake him awake and failed; the man was auditioning for the morgue. I considered throwing his phone in the bin and, in a display of restraint that should count toward my revalidation, relented.
Eventually I picked up the fucking phone myself and informed her that her boyfriend was not dead, merely doing a very good job acting like it, and that she might be better served dating an ENT specialist who could address the hearing loss, or someone from GI who could work up the clonazepam autobrewery syndrome he had evidently developed. She sounded understanding, or at least relieved to hear a male voice, then immediately pivoted to texting him, with a follow-up call ten minutes later. He did apologize at some point. I have forgiven him, because his life is clearly its own punishment.
I believe I've mentioned a cute Dutch doctor before. The one I was rather confident had a crush on me. With my tolerance for workplace drama being what it is, I'd kept things strictly platonic, barring some barely contained wheezing at her accidental innuendo. My Emotional Support Lesbian (asexual) had long lobbied for me to make a move. I always declined, explaining that I knew perfectly well my reluctance was downstream of a bad inferiority complex and a healthy impostor syndrome, and that knowing this did precisely nothing to dissolve it. Insight, as I tell my patients, is necessary but not sufficient.
She rotated to a different department, but I saw her again before she left. She got to see me doing much better than I'd been when we first met. Without going into detail, I managed to pay down some of the enormous mental debt I felt I owed her. It's a very good story, it really is, and I can't be arsed to write it. I returned favors. I was there for her on the day the NHS cracked even her armor. And we ended up on what even the most self-loathing, insecure version of me couldn't classify as anything other than a date, accidentally on purpose. Four hours. I could practically feel the ionizing radiation as she assessed me for husband material, and, unless I've badly misread the dosimetry, found me to her liking. Not the first sign, either, unless someone wants to tell me that Dutch women casually announce "It's such a shame that men are scared away by competent, career-oriented women" while you're mid-bite of a sandwich. I choked slightly. As I've always said: true of many men, but not me.
I hadn't expected to see her again, and I'd already gotten the platonic farewells out of the way, wishing her well on a career that plainly requires no blessing from me. She is very good at her job. Good enough that I genuinely wondered what the fuck I'd been doing at her age. I got better at some point, is my defense.
I will probably not move ahead with it, and it hurts to write that sentence. I have nothing against women with careers; I just watched myself fall for one. What I have is a finite battery and a realistic model of what it means to love someone who lives at a hundred miles an hour and fits more into an evening than I do into half a week. Distance. Rotational placements. I might be able to keep up. I'm not sure I have the energy to find out. I did have the energy to write 9000+ words about her that evening, because that is the only way I know how to process anything: I pin the longing to the page, next to the pain, where neither can hurt me on the move.
All I can say is that I said and did the things that the SMH of three months ago, that shivering, scared and sorry bastard, had wished he could say and do. I'd like to promise there will be no regrets. I'll settle for reporting that I took the worst of them out back with a shovel and came home alone. I've never been one to hope too hard for second chances (a lie), and I got one I could never have dreamed of. It's a considered decision. It is also a painful one; the two categories overlap far more often than anyone admits. I hope she finds what she's looking for: a family, a farm and a future. And at least she leaves with my link to a LessWrong essay on embryo preservation, plus my own comment underneath. I am exactly that kind of nerd.
Tease.
To be fair, I have written the story. Every detail of that day, somewhere in the ballpark of 9600 words. The problem is that it is too personal, and making it safe or suitable for public consumption would take an enormous amount of time.
Hey, at least I was coaxed into spilling one of the more cinematic moments. There was so much, that day, it took at least 5 hours to cover most of it. Why? I forget. Human memory is imprecise. I wanted to capture what I felt in the heat of the moment. I am, despite my best efforts, a romantic. And I'm very good at missing opportunities and then making up for it the first chance I get.
I get it, no, really, I do, but those of us that are interested in such things are left hanging. Good for you for actually writing it out at least.
I'm sorry. I recall seeing your comment, but I lacked the context for a proper response. I suppose the title of the book is all the context I really need, unless you want to talk about it. I hope you figure things out, and find someone new, who is better for you.
I get why you wouldn't want to air your private laundry is what I'm trying to get at, not trying to threadjack you here.
But you're still a tease. =P
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