make peace

I came across this quote the other day: 

You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.

Iyanla Vanzant, Yesterday, I Cried

I think that last line hit me. It made me realize that I was going to burn those things because I couldn't deal with them. Because that represented my wound, and I wasn't able to make peace with it, so I sought the easy way out, and that was the make it all disappear--physically disappear. 

The ironic thing is, I don't even know if it'd work. I just want it to go away so badly that I wanted to literally incinerate it. 

But what I needed to do is to, like it says, remove the pain from all of it and make peace. 

To make peace

Give me strength..

my choice

I saw an old friend yesterday and raided Starbucks. I got my usual green tea goodness, and she a strawberry smoothie. We did some catching up.  She talked about dresses. I talked about some tv shows. We talked about what happens after college.

She wanted to do Peace Corp, and she became especially solid on that idea after her semester in Tanzania. It felt like home there, she said, and that she connected with the environment and felt home with its ancestries. It was great to see her passion about an amazing goal in life.

The topic strung back to me, and a sense of uncertainty that shouldn't have appeared washed over me. What if after all of this hard work and sacrifice...I don't end up liking what I do? I'm in pharmaceutical research right now and, while I do enjoy the objective approach to science, I can't imagine myself sitting at a desk doing data analysis, running gels, C18 columns, or mixing chemicals to digest or quench proteins for 8 hours a day and waiting for that 5pm to roll around. I just can't. As much as I enjoy what I'm helping to accomplish, I'm pretty certain now that research is not what I want to do.

At the same time, I chose the medicine field; I wanted to do this because I want to be able to do something to help people who don't have to knowledge to help themselves; so I can provide a source of comfort because I can do something about certain types of struggle; so I can take away suffering.

I want to talk to people; I want to meet new people; I want to be able to help people I have never met, not to mention the people I love. Some people say these reasons are too naive and generalized, but I know it's not wrong.

There is at least another 7-8 years left of this journey, and I'd be in my late 20s.

I picked up this burden, and I need to carry this through. It is my choice, and I need to live with it until I'm there. I feel like I need slightly more willpower to carry this through.

I feel like, along with many other things in my life, I'm almost becoming weary of what I'm pursuing. There are plenty of other interesting fields I could have chosen: education, psychology, cooking, technology, music... I know I may enjoy those as well, but instead I chose the one of the most difficult career choices.

My parents say that it is the only field that can truly help people, and I know that's true and no one can refute that. But I just think that given that I want to be helpful, I have no choice but to get an MD. Do you know how that feels? It's not an external pressure, but an internal one. It will not be a "job" or a "career," or "my duty."

It'll just be me.

I guess...I'm just saying that I hope I will end up nothing short of loving who I become in the end.

--

Heh, and she was still staring at others' dresses. No Em I'm not gonna stare with you...

i don't know what to name this

I haven’t told anyone about this, ever. For some reason, however, I think I should talk about it a little bit, even though I don’t really feel like talking about it.

Ever since around early high school, I started to become very self-conscious about the number of moles that have been randomly popping up on my face. Honestly, now I probably have like about ten, maybe more. That is just on my face alone, there are like five to ten on my hand and arms, and it just feels like they’re popping out everywhere. Whenever I look in the mirror I always try not to focus on them, but I still and I hate them. They make me super self-conscious about my looks. I think my mom said that she knows something that can potentially remove moles effectively-some sort of cream or something, and that she’ll try to find it and grab one for me to try.

I guess it’s better than nothing.

But yea, I’m not gonna link this to tumblr or anything. I’m just going to leave this here. If you find it, good for you. I wasn’t really expecting anything to read this cause, well, it’s really for my own sanity. But I guess…now you know.

That is all.