We have been carrying a lot these days, and it is difficult to know how we are supposed to feel about it all. Join the #MedHumChat community for a discussion about Unpacking Emotions. This chat was curated by #MedHumChat community member Carly Sokach (@CarlySokach)
Rachel Naomi Remen: “Damming the River” from Kitchen Table Wisdom
At the beginning, I reacted to suffering and limitation with rage. At fifteen, when I had become very ill, I needed to consult my disease on the simplest matters. Would it allow me to eat a piece of cheese? Did I have the strength to walk up this flight of stairs? Would it be possible to sit through the movies without needing to leave because of agonizing stomach pains? The authority of this disease would brook no argument from me. It still shapes my life, but with a far lighter hand.
Perhaps only an adolescent can feel the sort of rage I felt then. I hated all the well people, hated the side of my family that passed me these genes. I hated my body. I was in this state of rage for almost ten years.
Shortly before my final year of medical training, things changed. I had been offered the opportunity to be senior resident at a fine training hospital. Yet I barely had enough strength to do the work I was presently doing. Here was one more dream stolen. That afternoon I drove to the old beach house that had been given to our hospital for the use of faculty and staff. In turmoil, I walked wearily along the water’s edge, comparing myself to others my own age, people of seemingly boundless vitality. I came up wanting. I remember thinking that this disease had robbed me of my youth. I did not yet know what it had given me in exchange.
Ada Limon: Instructions on Not Giving Up
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.