Nostalgia and Newsletters

I was reading through some old blog posts today, which I don’t do very often. Unlike Dave, I’m not a very nostalgic person. But I liked reading these posts (Sovereign Mysteries, Isolation and Intimacy, Guts and Glory). Goodness, I was so meditative back then. I wanted to write like Annie Dillard, or Annie Proulx.

And my life was so much about medicine. I skimmed through a copy of Wilmer’s latest newsletter lately, instead of ditching it straight into the recycling as usual, and it was like looking at a strange alternative version of how my life could (should) have ended up. They had bios of new hires, and mine would have trumped every single one there, except it would have stopped after residency, just ended like an awkward amputation. Instead of she is an associate professor of comprehensive ophthalmology at [insert elite academic institution here] whose research is making advances in the cure of [insert obscure eye disease here] under the funding of [insert major grant here] and the efforts of generous donors, it would read she works two days a week at a small rural clinic providing general eye care. Being honest, it would read she is now an expert on the best cleaning appliances, worthwhile children’s books, and quick-and-healthy family meal recipes. It would practically have switched to another genre, another channel. From full-scholarship Harvard to—what? This isn’t what I paid for!

Inexplicably, to Dave’s consternation and sometimes my own surprise, I have no misgivings about where I am. This is the channel I want to be on. It’s just odd sometimes to take myself back, to before. A little jarring. I guess the appropriate back-story of my current narrative would have been taking home-ec in high school and going to a local college and medical school, but that wouldn’t have been me (an understatement; I wouldn’t have been caught dead doing that at the time). And yet, here I am, local again, at a place where people who see me with the kids assume I’m a home-schooling Christian who has never worked, where I have to say “eye doctor” instead of “ophthalmologist” (you mean, like glasses?), and where no one knows how to pronounce Esme (which I joke correlates with level of education and/or literary knowledge).

Yet, like I say, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now. I look at my former colleagues chasing after the next thing, hardly seeing their kids, and I look at people here who so thoughtfully live out their lives with principle, and I wonder how much that newsletter-stuff matters in the end anyway. In many ways, personally and relationally and practically, I’ve gotten to the heart of being Christ-like more now than I had in all the earlier glitz and glory.

But sometimes it does get lonely. I miss having friends and colleagues who push me intellectually, though I think if I did, they wouldn’t understand the decisions I’ve made in my career. I’m grateful for godly mom friends here, but while they can suggest a fun place to take the kids, they can’t empathize with the stress of difficult surgical outcomes or a challenging patient in clinic.

I wonder if my narrative will change again some day. I wonder how much of myself will have changed by then, or whether I’ll mostly still be the same (probably both). I look back on how easily I articulated why I loved medicine, and remind myself to do the same now about being with the kids. Articulate to myself, and them, what I enjoy and what they make me think about. And I should probably keep ditching most of those newletters.