Why Are People Assholes? (A Mostly Rhetorical Question)

One of my friends is grieving.  She's going through a major loss, and although she is very guarded with her emotions, I can see that she is hurting deeply.  I wish there were something I could do to take the pain away, but as is usually the case, all I can offer is a sympathetic ear, words of compassion, and an endless supply of hugs.  Nothing, and everything.

I hate when people suffer.  I've dedicated my working life to doing what I can to minimize suffering, and I try in all my interactions with people to be kind.  To not add anything further to the burdens that people already carry.  So when I see people acting cruelly, I am overwhelmed by the question "why?".  Why do billionaires underpay their employees and not allow them bathroom breaks?  Why do teenagers beat up homeless people?  Why do jerks go onto Twitter and attack perfectly wonderful personal finance bloggers about their decisions to buy new cars?

Is it just a failure of empathy?  A failure to see the humanity of the other person and give a shit about what they're going through?  And, if it is, how do people get so broken that they don't care about the pain they cause others?

Rich People Can Be Sad

When I opened Facebook last Friday morning, the status of one of my friends read "Don't turn on CNN".

In the comment below, it said "Dear God, not Anthony Bourdain."

Dear God, indeed.  I am not usually one to get upset about the death of a celebrity, as I'm practical and recognize that there are vastly more important things to worry about right now, but I fucking loved Anthony Bourdain.  He was sexy and unapologetic and smart and absolutely obsessed with food.  He was the stereotypical entitled white male, and I should have hated him based on my usual patterns, but I didn't.  Because although he was rich and had every door in the world open to him, he was also kind.  He treated the guests on his show, and the food they served him, with respect.  It's possible that he was a total jerk in real life, but his public persona was good.

He also responded to me on Twitter.

I recently called him out for his lack of female representation on The Layover, and he responded with a "Yep".  It was the absolute minimum he could have done to acknowledge me, but I was still gleeful about receiving a response from The.  Anthony.  Bourdain.

And now he's gone.

Within minutes of the news that he had killed himself, people were starting to speculate about the whys of it.  And of course, there were people who said things like "What did he have to be depressed about?  He had so much money."

Which....seriously?

Don't get me wrong.  We all know that there are some very good things about money, starting from its ability to provide us with necessities (food, clothing, shelter) and extending to its ability to fly us to France for fancy pastries.  Water is also wet.  But while some amount of money is necessary for happiness, no amount of it is enough to buy happiness.

It doesn't fix loneliness.
Or broken brain chemistry.
Or a traumatic past.

It doesn't create love.
Or community.
Or a life purpose.

I have had no money and I have had lots of money in my life, and while I definitely prefer the latter, I also know that money doesn't protect me from being sad.

And we need to stop thinking that it does.

Because even rich people like Anthony Bourdain deserve to be cared for when they're depressed.  They deserve forgiveness and understanding for not being able to stay in this often hostile world.

I forgive and understand you Tony.  And I will miss the heck out of you.

Grief is Not Linear

When I was in my third year of medical school, my Dad asked me to feel a lump in his armpit.  Seven months later, he died of the melanoma that had metastasized from a tiny mole on his arm.

Surviving my Dad's death was one of the hardest things I've ever done.  I wrote about it here once, in the part of the blog that was lost in the great purge, and I described it as being like walking around without skin.  Everything hurt.  I made it through my last two years of medical school only thanks to some very supportive friends and terror at the thought of not matching to a residency program.

And then my Dad was gone and medical school was over, and I thought that I had left grief behind.  I didn't think of him often; I could talk to patients about death without crying; and I started to feel happy again.  (Or, as happy as a neurotic first-year Internal Medicine resident is capable of feeling.)  I was moving on, and grief wasn't coming with me.

Until it did.  When I matched to fellowship, I grieved the fact that my father would never know what specialty I had gone into.  When I started dating my first girlfriend, I grieved the fact that he would never see me dating a woman, even though he'd reached a tenuous peace with me being bisexual.  And then again, in the middle of my last and longest relationship, I grieved that my girlfriend would never get to see firsthand how much I am a clone of my father.

I have been surprised over the past eight years to realize that grief never goes away.  It lies dormant for a while, sometimes long enough that I can forget it was ever there, but it inevitably returns, each time just as painful as when it was fresh.  Every time it comes back feels like a surprise hit to the chest, knocking the breath from my body.

The same thing is happening right now with the semi-recent end of my relationship.  A few weeks ago, I found myself humming happily at work, and I distinctly remember thinking about how nice it was to be so happy.  I was even going to write a smug blog post about how good life was and how bloody happy I was, but I was enjoying my happiness too much to bother.

And then my ex-girlfriend started dating again.

And posted pictures of her new girlfriend on Facebook.

And now I feel like I'm 14 instead of 40, because I am hurting over my ex-girlfriend's social media activities.  I am supposed to be over her, and yet I find myself barely able to drag myself through the day.  I cry on my drive into work, because I have to pass the coffee shop where we waited while we got winter tires, followed by the restaurant to which we took her friends from Egypt to try schnitzel.  Grief redux.

And it is completely irrational, because there is no part of me that wants to go back to the relationship.  It's not even that I want her to not date, because I do want her to date and to be happy.  I'm not a horrible person wishing misery on her just so that I won't be miserable.  And yet, I am sad.  Horribly, inexplicably, unexpectedly sad.

And I can't even drink, because I'm still on call for eight more days.

Packing my Minimalist Suitcase

My ex-partner was the antithesis of a minimalist.  Any time I would clear out a space, it would almost instantaneously be filled with something of hers.  Living with her was like the principle of nature abhors a vacuum manifested hoarder-style.

Since she moved out, I have been slowly returning to my preferred state of being a semi-minimalist.  I've taken four large bags of books to my Little Free Library; I've thrown out the three-year-old bottles of condiments that we never used; and I've even gone through my memory box and gotten rid of the awards and report cards that dated back to elementary school.  In this new stage of life, I am focusing on being lighter.

In the spirit of minimalism, when I started packing for my current trip, I decided to limit myself to one carry on bag and one camera bag (which has some extra space for books/a jacket/a water bottle).  I didn't need to do this, as I could have easily brought one of my larger suitcases, but I wanted to see whether I could fit my life into a small space for a week.

It was a lot easier than I thought.  My suitcase easily held two pairs of jeans, a warm sweater, two pairs of pajamas, and more than enough socks, underwear, and t-shirts.  There was room for five books, my french workbooks*, and a notebook.  My computer, my cell phone, and my camera with an extra lens.  Everything I will need.

But the constraints of space did force me to leave a few things behind, like my ex's long-sleeved t-shirt.  The cozy one that I bought her while at a conference in Boston, which was always a favourite of mine, and which she returned to me after the breakup.  The one I've been putting on every evening when I arrive home from work.  The most tangible reminder I have of what we were, and what was lost.  I am not usually one to assign emotions to physical things, but somehow lately it has felt as if all of my grief is contained within this piece of cotton.

So I left it at home. 

*I'm going to Quebec to practice my French for a week!  Je pense que ce sera plus dur que je pensais.

Post Mortem

I keep opening this post, typing a few sentences, deleting them, and closing the post again without publishing anything.  I alternate between wanting to write a few lines to get it over with and wanting to pour everything in my heart out, consequences be damned.  I suspect in the end I'll do something in between, although it's hard to know, because whereas I usually have some idea of what a post will look like before I write it, this time I'm improvising.

I've heard it said that life keeps giving you the same lesson, over and over again, until you learn it.  For me, the lesson that I seem to be unable to learn is to let a relationship go the first time it ends.  In every long-term relationship I've ever been in, after the relationship has fallen apart, I've always gone back to see if the pieces could be reassembled.  Instead of just dealing with the loss and moving on from it, I've let myself be stuck in the process of the relationship ending, asking over and over again, "Can I make this work?"

The answer, of course, is no.  With rare exception, a relationship that has truly ended - in a furniture-moved-out, shared-possessions-divided-up kind of way - can't be made to work.  And that is the long and the short of what happened with M and I.  Our relationship ended over a year ago when I called it quits, but thanks to optimism and poor judgement and the ability of good memories to block out the bad ones, I invested a whole other year into making absolutely certain that it was over.

It hasn't all been bad.  In the past year, we've eaten chicken wings at trivia night and picked strawberries at the U-pick and camped under multiple starry skies.  We traveled to Europe in the Spring, eating currywurst in Berlin and waffles in Brussels.  There has been a lot of struggle and a lot of unhappiness, but there has also been life, in all of its beautiful imperfection.  And while I wish we hadn't been so unhappy, I don't wish away our last year together.

ZebraNRP at Mothers in Medicine wrote a beautiful post recently about the end of her marriage, and I have gone back to it multiple times over the past few months, while I've been witnessing the last days of my own relationship.  I love her idea that something isn't a failure just because it ends.  I also love the poem that someone included in one of the comments, and it seems like a fitting way to end this post.

          Failing and Flying
          Jack Gilbert, 1925 - 2012

          Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
          It’s the same when love comes to an end,
          or the marriage fails and people say
          they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
          said it would never work. That she was
          old enough to know better. But anything
          worth doing is worth doing badly.
          Like being there by that summer ocean
          on the other side of the island while
          love was fading out of her, the stars
          burning so extravagantly those nights that
          anyone could tell you they would never last.
          Every morning she was asleep in my bed
          like a visitation, the gentleness in her
          like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
          Each afternoon I watched her coming back
          through the hot stony field after swimming,
          the sea light behind her and the huge sky
          on the other side of that. Listened to her
          while we ate lunch. How can they say
          the marriage failed? Like the people who
          came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
          and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
          I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
          but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Radio Silence

After a brief period of activity, I've been quiet here for the past few weeks.  It isn't because I've had nothing to write about.  I've actually had too much to write about, but I simply couldn't, and so I've been silent.

M and I have separated.

Again.

I will likely write more about this in the future, as I enjoy oversharing personal information on the internet, but that's all I'm going to write for now.

Enjoy some David Gray!

Afterwards

Life is a strange contrast at the moment.  I am on call for the week, so my days are run-off-my-feet busy between my regular clinic schedule and the added inpatient service.  I am constantly scribbling notes in a chart while balancing my cell phone on my shoulder, or listening to my resident present a patient while I not so inconspicuously scan blood work on the computer.  I start my days anxious and I finish them overwhelmed, uncertain of where I will get the energy to do it all again tomorrow. 

And then I go home.  My pager is relatively silent most evenings, my apartment even more so.  My dining room table is empty, the jacket and wallet and keys that used to live there now scattered across the dining room table at my ex-girlfriends' family home.  Beyond feeding myself and the two cats, there is nothing that I have to do.  I read for a few minutes, then watch tv for a few minutes, then stare at the cats willing them to be better conversationalists.  Occasionally they purr, and I tell myself that they are trying to make me happy, although I am well aware that cats are inherently assholes.

I don't know what to do with myself.

For two years, my life was filled with her and with the bustle of activities that filled her restless, extroverted life.  The first day after the breakup, my introverted self reveled in the stillness of her absence, but as time passes stillness transforms into tedium.  There is no shortage of things I should do - the not quite unpacked suitcase from our trip is still on my bedroom floor, and there are always dishes - but I am longing to want to do something.  I am five-year-old me, whining at my mother: "I'm bored".

"Clean your room," she replies, and the answer is as unsatisfying now as it was 34 years ago.

Zero

Two major events happened last week.

First, I finally hit the zero point on my net worth.  After two years of budgeting and frugal(ish) living, I finally dug myself out of the hole that medical training and lots of careless spending created.  I feel a little bit lighter and a little bit less stressed, but it hasn't been quite as momentous an achievement as I had hoped.  Now that I am officially worthless (ha ha), I want to actually start accumulating some money.  An emergency fund!  A down payment on a home!  Apparently I'm incapable of being satisfied with where I am in life.

Second...I broke up with my girlfriend of two years.

It's hard to know what to say about this, because there are so many things at play in a breakup, and they never quite fit together into a coherent story.  It's inevitably messy.  I can say that it was my decision, that I had a sense it was coming for a while, that I'm doing okay.  That it is very strange to watch carloads of her things disappear from my small apartment and to see my old life emerging from underneath them.  That the worst thing in the world is hurting someone you love.  There is so much more.

For now, one of the many songs that I'm listening to, over and over again.

Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written

"The facts of this world seen clearly

are seen through tears;

why tell me then

there is something wrong with my eyes?

To see clearly and without flinching,

without turning away,

this is agony, the eyes taped open

two inches from the sun." - Margaret Atwood

Part of my girlfriend's job involves resettling Syrian refugees.  After experiencing almost unspeakable horrors in their home country, these people have now traveled halfway across the world to a foreign city searching for something better.  Which they don't always find.  The cold and the grey of a Canadian winter, even as it begins to melt into spring, isn't always inviting.  The residents of my city too aren't always welcoming towards more people who will need government support (more taxes on the already overtaxed) to establish themselves.  The low-income housing into which people are placed doesn't always match with the image of an affluent Canadian city.  Life here can be hard.

And so they talk.  They talk about many of the sad things from their pasts and about the disappointment that they don't leave the sadness behind when they physically leave their country.  They talk to my girlfriend, and she listens because she's a good person and can feel these people's need to unburden themselves, if only a little.  With each story, each heartbreaking story, some of the weight of their experience transfers from them to her.  Their loads lighten, hers becomes heavier.

And I see it in her.  I see it in how she laughs a little bit less and seems a little bit more distracted when we talk.  I see it when I awaken in the night, and she is already awake, her mind unable to rest.  And I know what it is like, to bear witness to the suffering of others, and to feel powerless.

And I wonder, how do we - the doctors, the nurses, the social workers, the myriad of helpers - stay intact?  How do we witness these things and not be destroyed by them?  How do we keep coming back, day after day, offering what little we have to offer, when all we see is the neverending need?