When Breath Becomes Air, When Words Become Meaning

After some severe writer's block, I'm making a deliberate attempt to return to regular blogging. I figured a good place to start was explaining why I dropped off the map for five months, exploding inwards like a supernova. Or a black hole. 

I'm currently reading When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, a book about a physician who grapples with death upon receiving a diagnosis of lung cancer. I'm nowhere near as smart as Kalanithi, nor do I have any intention of becoming a doctor (nor is this my announcement that I have terminal lung cancer), but something about this book feels like I wrote it nonetheless. 

He describes studying neuroscience to better understand human behavior, blurring the sharp dividing line between the technical fields of anatomy and physiology and the hand-wavey ones of emotion and empathy. I'm drawn to math and computer science for the same reason -- through the right looking glass, science is art and religion. 

He explains that, as a product of growing up with doctor parents, "[he] knew medicine only by its absence". No line has ever been truer for me. In elementary school, my parents placed me and my sister in an after-school daycare program, and there we sat every day until 6:30pm with the rest of the kids whose parents didn't love them enough to pick them up when class got out. Once I complained about this arrangement, sulking about every way I was different from my white, suburban, soccer-mom classmates. My mother sat me down and told me about the patients she had seen that day -- a child so sick that a team of nurses couldn't stop the bleeding long enough to investigate the root cause of it. Another boy born so prematurely he weighed less than a pound. A girl with congenital heart disease, who would never be able to sprint during recess.

I never complained again. 

It still hurt, though, knowing that other babies needed my parents more than I did. As an adult, I can appreciate that they both carried this double burden of parenting and saving lives with incredible ease, somehow being super involved while building career dynasties of their own. But I still cannot help but see medicine as a thing that robbed me -- ironically, perhaps the way normal people see illness. 

But perhaps the most resonant thing Kalanithi has said is this: "If the examined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?" This is the best way I know to explain where I've been this past semester. This blog only works because I muse about my life, so when that life became grim and horrific (and worse: stagnant), I froze. How do I write about my sister graduating when no students are left in Gaza? Should I joke about Home Alone 2 when Trump is a convicted felon? What personal narratives do I have left, when all I've done in recent memory is study, sleep, and stress about the job market crumbling around me? Rates of PTSD amongst college kids have risen dramatically post-pandemic, which is another way of saying it's no longer satisfying to learn, because all that's left to know is remarkably depressing. I felt overwhelmingly that my life was both hyper-examined and unlived, and that no amount of prose could pull me out of the darkness.

But somehow, in this murky haze, I found a startling truth. I wrote on this blog once that I'll always be a little bit unhappy; I realize now that "being a little unhappy" is, in itself, a privilege -- how many people are lucky enough to despair about their place in this world? How many people are so confident that they'll live to see 80 that they're worried about the impending catastrophes that might greet them there? 

I think Kalanithi, ultimately, writes about powerlessness. More frustrating than tragedy is knowing there's nothing to be done, whether about a cancer diagnosis or the...*waves hand* general state of affairs. But Michelle Obama once said to a young girl who asked how she can save the world -- "You can't. Not yet anyway, because you don't have the means or tools to do that right now. Right now, all you can do is your homework." 

Which is to say, this is my homework. This blog is how I make sense of everything meaningful to me, from politics to finance to self-actualization. My months off have forced me to confront how grounding this practice truly is, of sitting down with only my thoughts and Spotify's Instrumental Study playlist. I'm sorry I was gone, but I won't be again.