Once upon a time, I wrote a lot because it was one of the little things that made me happy. Sharing stories from the depths of my imagination made me feel like I was being understood. It felt like communication, and seeing people get emotional over my words made me feel like I wasn’t as strange as I felt. Somehow, I always felt that nobody around me really understood me so my young self turned to expressing my immature thoughts through my characters. Eventually, I grew older and developed ambition, guided by the pressure of the world normalizing success. I wanted to listen to people, hear their story and somehow help them using knowledge that I acquired through effort—so here I am studying medicine.
I remember telling myself that I’d never stop writing, and all my greatest idols in the medical field were writers just as much as they were doctors. I haven’t stopped, but I have begun to realize that the time and energy I devoted to my ambitions took the motivation away from most of my stories. I wondered if time was the issue—or maybe even my energy at the end of the day. I used to stay up writing after doing homework just because I couldn’t go to bed if I didn’t put down my ideas. Now, my journey into medicine feels so clear cut that I do not know where to begin to look for inspiration. The next 10 years of my life seems pretty clear, in contrast to my young self who had no clue where I was headed. I dreamed about studying abroad and meeting new people in worlds far away. It was all so new. Now I am limited to my ambitions in a way I hadn’t expected.
I wish to start writing again, but to find a story I wish to tell is the first step. I will return to it when I find myself with a story worth sharing, that I would stop at nothing to write it all down.
