Hampuy — Calling My Soul Back Home

Do You Remember Your Personal Statement?

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.

Do you remember yours?

Not the polished version you submitted. The real one. The one that lived in your chest when you still believed medicine was a calling. Somewhere along the way, that voice got quieter. Not because it disappeared. But because, for many of us, leaving our bodies became a way to survive.

In Andean tradition, there is a word: Hampuy. Come back. Come home.

It is said after moments of shock. When a child falls and hits their head. After heartbreak. After loss. After anything that causes part of the self to pull away.

They say it three times.Then they say the person’s name. Calling the soul back into the body.

In Western medicine, we treat injury. We stabilize. We assess. We move quickly to the next step.

But no one stands at the bedside and says: Come back. Come home. And physicians leave themselves over and over again. Medical school. Residency. The first patient death. The tenth. The hundredth.

Each time, it becomes a little easier to step away. Each time, it feels a little more normal. Until one day, you realize you are functioning perfectly…and barely living inside your own body.

When I first heard the word Hampuy, something in me softened. What if healing isn’t about becoming someone new? What if it’s about returning? Not all at once. Not dramatically. But slowly. Gently. Calling yourself back into your own life.