My bookshelves are filled with stacks of journals cataloguing my inner thoughts—sometimes with brutal honesty—through the best and worst moments of my life. At times the writing is near-incoherent. At others, every word has been carefully and methodically placed to spell out an important thought. I did morning pages for a year. But aside from the occasional poem, my writing was a very private piece of my life. Then a few years ago, I started a blog. I was going through a very difficult time in my life: I was severely depressed. I was in danger of academic probation. I was isolating myself from the people that mattered to me, and spiraling down a very dark drain, and I didn’t know how to communicate that to them. Vulnerability is something I have always struggled with. The times when I let down even the most superficial walls around my inner self are few and far between, and only with the most trusted people in my life. In some areas of my life, this has been a strength: The ability to maintain a calm, confident exterior regardless of how you’re feeling inside is an asset in my line of work—Emergency Medical Services—where your job is to present a calm presence of reassurance to your patient, though internally you might be feeling scared, or panicked for any number of reasons. Perhaps you realize how sick they are, and are worried they’re going to deteriorate, even die. Perhaps you recognize the signs of violence escalation, and are worried they might attack you. Perhaps you’re just horrified, because your last call was a DOA (“dead on arrival”), but your current patient is in pain and right now your job is to remain calm and reassure him or her that they are safe, that they are not alone, and everything will be okay.
I remember one day in particular, where immediately after one call—a police stand-off with a barricaded suspect—my partner and I were dispatched to a young child with a dislocated knee. The staging call had been a mess: This call involved a major freeway being shut down in both directions, and so the resulting traffic made our access to-, or egress from the scene, an absolute nightmare. After hours of waiting with nothing happening, our dispatcher keyed up: “Engine 24, Battalion 2, Medic 337, your scene is secure: Single adult male, GSW to the head.” Traffic was such a cluster-fuck (bystanders were standing in the street to film and were slow to move out of our way) it took two minutes to get from our staging location to the actual scene, only to arrive and be told by police that we were cancelled, as the patient was DOA. There he sat, a 6 inch hole in the right side of his skull, brain matter spilling out and splattered all over the place. Interestingly, there wasn’t a lot of blood visible. An automatic rifle of some kind lay across his lap. He was pale-white. He was dead. A firefighter from the engine checked a pulse, found it absent, and the engine went through confirmation of death protocols. We were shortly cancelled, and soon after dispatched to the kid with the dislocated patella. And so a few minutes later, there I found myself, standing on a school playground with my partner, splinting the knee of this kid. He was crying his eyes out, and in a world of pain. While I finished the splint, my partner drew up some intranasal fentanyl. And because it was our job, both of us did our work professionally, with calm, reassuring expressions. I told this little kid that he was going to be okay; that my partner was getting some medicine to make his pain better, and that his mom and dad were already on their way. The whole time, all I saw was brain matter spilling from the DOA’s skull. That scene was a bare half-mile east of us.
That invulnerability—”compartmentalization” has a more professional ring to it—is great when you’re in EMS. Except, the rest of your life, when you’re not going directly from DOAs to injured little kids, vulnerability is a strength; a lack thereof, a curse. My first blog was, originally, an exercise in learning to be more vulnerable. I wrote in it for almost six months before I even shared its existence with anyone, and it was another six months before I actually let anyone read it. The blog was technically public—though hidden deep in the maelstrom of the internet. Because of this, I was able to write with a relative degree of vulnerability, knowing that practically the blog was private, I let down my walls and bared my inner thoughts for the whole world—that is, anyone lucky enough to stumble upon my blog—to see. The result was that I was able to write with a level of raw honesty about how I was doing that I could not give to anyone else in my life, and when I finally felt ready to share that with some of my friends and family, I merely had to hand them the blog, rather than speak everything directly from the heart. Once they had read it, it was like a dam had been broken, and a flood of trust and communication poured into those close relationships. In this way, the blog was a massive success.
Time has passed since then, and I’ve outgrown that blog. It’s theme was heavily centered around motifs that had a strong current in my life then, that I’ve grown out of since. That blog, which is now both private and offline, served its purpose. Enter this blog, the natural evolution of, and next step in, this ongoing exercise in vulnerability. I’ve found myself wishing that I had a blog where I could write to a larger audience. That wish turned into a project, and this inaugural post is its fruition. The goal of this blog is as follows: To write more in a structured manner; to have a platform to exercise vulnerability by carefully letting down some of my walls and opening myself up to wider group of people in my life; to serve as a personal journal of my thoughts, feelings, and observations; to be a place where I can explore my passions and share them with the world: Namely, ECG interpretation, creative writing, emergency medicine, jiu jitsu, weightlifting, running, and any other topic that I find interesting.
This blog is titled Itself Towards The Heights, in homage to Camus’ famous words—
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
The myth of Sisyphus has always fascinated me, and served as a powerful image that has gotten me through some very dark times. In fact, during one long and particularly dark stay in a hospital, the social worker involved in my case printed out that quote on an image of Sisyphus, and taped it to the wall of my room for me. Every time I wanted to give up, I would look at that image, and find the will to keep going.
In Greek Mythology, Sysiphus cheated the gods. In punishment, he was sentenced to roll a boulder up a mountain for all eternity. Each time as he neared the top, the boulder would slip from his grasp, roll back down the hill, and he would be forced to descend to the bottom and start over again. I first discovered Sysiphus through Albert Camus when I read The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays in an introductory philosophy course I was taking, and was deeply moved by the work. Since then the image of Sisyphus has become an important symbol of perseverance to me. When I close my eyes, I see Sisyphus toiling without complaint or fear against his gargantuan boulder. Though he never completes his task, he takes his strength from the challenge set in front of him. He finds purpose in the immediate moment: Each agonizing step up the mountain, muscles straining, blood and sweat staining the path below. In my mind, Sisyphus’ fate is actually a blessing: What the Gods thought would be a cruel punishment has instead given him endless purpose in a world otherwise devoid of meaning. The question of how far he will make it each time excites him. “The struggle itself towards the heights,” as Camus wrote it, gives him joy. And when the boulder eventually slips from his grasp, it gives him rest: He walks back down the mountain, sun shining, with the beauty of the whole world laid out below him. In those moments, he experiences tranquility known by no other. And when he finally reaches the bottom, without pause he throws himself back against the rock to again struggle upwards. It is in his attitude that I strive to model my life.
And so arises this blog.
Along with this blog, I owe you, The Reader, an update on what’s new in my life. Perhaps that will become its own post, but in the meantime: I withdrew from UC Berkeley in 2022, and at the start of 2023, I went to school to become an EMT. In April of 2023, I was hired to work in Alameda County’s 911 EMS system. From April of 2023 to May of 2024, I worked full time in 911 EMS. That experience changed the whole trajectory of my life. I’ve seen things I can’t unsee. I’ve had the privilege to serve my community, advocate for people, and genuinely help make the world a little bit better of a place. I’ve learned how to stand up for myself and others. I’ve learned how to remain calm during a crisis. I’ve learned how to function on very little sleep. And perhaps the most importantly of all, I’ve found passion and purpose—in medicine. From May of 2024 to October of 2024, I took a turn away from 911 EMS, and worked as an EMT and firefighter on a US Forest Service Hotshot Crew. That was also an incredible learning experience, especially with regards to wilderness EMS. I returned from firefighting confident that I wanted to go back to school, and that I wanted to work in healthcare. But I wasn’t sure in what capacity, or how I’d get there. I set my sights on paramedic school, and began taking classes at community college. One of my classes, Anatomy & Physiology, is taught by a professor who, aside from just being flat-out amazing, is a physician, trained as a neonatal intensivist. Despite teaching an incredibly challenging class, he has an amazing way of engaging with his students, myself included.
And so it happened that I found myself sitting in class, and a thrill of excitement shot through my body. The material we were learning was so damn cool, and I was captivated listening to my professor talk about his experiences in medicine. And I thought to myself, “I’m going to become a doctor.” And it was settled.
Well, shortly after deciding that you as a 27 year old without a bachelors degree want to pursue medicine, the sheer amount of work ahead of you sets in. So aside from working hard to stay on top of my coursework, I’ve been spending much of my time recently sitting with my decision to pursue medicine, and making the necessary changes in my life to prepare and plan for the long years of school and work ahead of me. I’ve also been dating a bit, continuing to try to work through this nagging right groin injury I’ve been dealing with, working on this blog, and I’ve also started therapy again. I even got a tattoo (I still need one more session before it’s complete).
A former friend of mine used to ask her friends “what’s something that’s been on your mind recently, that you haven’t been able to talk about?” I guess this blog is my way of both asking, and answering, that question. And so if there is something on your mind, Reader, that you have been unable to share with anyone—I hope you’ll reach out to me and share it. I want to hear what you have to say. So Reader, I leave you with this:
Life has its moments of darkness. Sometimes the darkness extends so far that you feel like you might never escape it. When that happens, let the dust and crashing sounds of your boulder as it tears back down the mountain guide you forward. Put one foot in front of the other, and somehow, you’ll find your way back down to the bottom. There it is: Lying patiently, waiting for you. The Boulder. So throw yourself against it with abandon, and begin to struggle again towards the heights. And maybe from out of your own darkness, you might find yourself—happy: Sisyphus, struggling once more against gravity.