Reflections on medicine, healing, and becoming.
50
For weeks, I’ve felt disconnected from the number. Fifty sounded old. I found myself wondering, What happened to my life?
I’ve grieved the feeling that I somehow lost my thirties and forties. Looking back, I think I spent much of those years surviving: doing what needed to be done, carrying responsibilities, taking care of everyone else, and moving from one obligation to the next.
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Hampuy: Calling My Soul Back Home
There is a question I avoided for years. Not because I didn’t know the answer. But because I wasn’t sure I could feel it anymore.
Viktor Frankl wrote, “If you find a why, you can bear almost any how.”
At one point, most of us knew our why. We wrote it into our personal statements. Before the pager. Before the metrics. Before the slow erosion of meaning that gets disguised as professionalism.
The Overwhelm No One Sees
The overwhelm is almost impossible to explain. Most physicians are so overwhelmed that even describing it feels inadequate, like trying to explain color to someone who has never seen it. It isn’t just being busy or tired. It’s a sustained level of pressure that, over time, starts to feel irrational.
What I’m Practicing While I Find My Way Back to Myself
From the outside, it may look like I’m holding it all together. And in many ways, I am.
But for a long time, on the inside, it felt chaotic. Overwhelming. Unsustainable. I used to think I was falling apart.
Now I understand it differently. My nervous system didn’t feel safe. And when your system is dysregulated—especially if you’re someone who naturally feels deeply—you don’t just notice other people’s emotions, you absorb them. No one teaches us this.
So instead of trying to fix everything at once, I’ve been learning to practice something new.
These aren’t things I’ve mastered. They’re things I’m practicing.
Living day by day, moment by moment.
The Shortcut I Forgot I Already Knew
In my last post, I wrote about the moment my balance shifted in the middle of a Barre3 class. A simple glance. A quiet comparison. The way my body wobbled before my mind could catch up.
I wrote about rebuilding my boundary in real time. About remembering my Galinda bubble. About learning to move through life protected instead of stepping out of it.
If you haven’t read that piece yet, you can start there.
It wasn’t the comparison. It wasn’t even the bubble. It was how much energy it took to return to myself. I don’t always have that kind of time.
Real life doesn’t pause while I gather my wisdom. My throat tightens. My chest contracts. Someone speaks. Something lands.
The Moment I Remembered My Bubble
And then I see someone I know. Just a glance. Simple.
And there goes my balance. I wobble, and the old story steps forward — my body reacting before my mind starts telling its story.
She’s more centered. More balanced. More confident.
She moves with ease. She looks and feels like she belongs inside herself.
I feel unfinished — like a children’s drawing, all outside the lines.
And there’s that voice
That voice.