Category: Uncategorized

It just sits there. It doesn’t have it’s own shape, but it can have shape. It’s like air, but we can see it and we can feel it’s heft. It seems like a passive form of matter, but it’s persistent and with time carves canyons.

When you bite a cookie you can’t really choose what parts of the cookie you taste, you just bite it. Sure you can pick out the nuts or the chocolate chips before you bite, but the essence is still there; it’s baked in. Some components are impossible to pick out, so you either gotta learn to live with it or just avoid that type of cookie entirely.

I’m usually not a picky eater, but I don’t really like peanut butter cookies.

I feel like I’ve started being more comfortable being straight-up and honest with people, which in many ways has been helpful for my own mental health by alleviating some of the anxiety of keeping thoughts and feelings bottled up. There are certain things that a better left unsaid though. Whether its an apology, unfiltered honesty, there are certain cases in which saying exactly what’s on your mind, while potentially liberating for myself, may cause harm to those around me, or even to myself in the long run.

As long as I can remember, I’ve hated coloring things. For me it was always a tedious, stressful, anxiety-inducing activity. On one hand I kind of want to color quickly so I can get the picture looking how I want it to (or, as was the case when I was little, so I can go out and play). On the other hand I get super frustrated if any stray marks find their way even a fraction of a millimeter outside of the black outline (sometime seeing the mark on the black lines is even pushing it).

I always just thought this was the way I was; that I was just naturally a pseudo-compulsive. However, recently I was having a conversation with my mom and she actually brought up my elementary school-era coloring habits and knew exactly where and how it all started. Apparently, on one of my report cards in kindergarten my teacher made a comment that I was not doing a great job of coloring inside the lines. I was so hurt and traumatize from that one comment, which was probably both common amongst my classmates and objectively true, that from that moment on I must have vowed never to color outside the lines again.

Looking back, I like to imagine pre-report card Niko happily coloring away, outlines be damned, just making a complete mess of the page with no regard for the boundaries set before him. Little did he know that his carefree dreams and creative aspirations would soon be crushed and reformed by the academic automaton that we call our education system (I don’t blame you Ms. McQueen, you’re still my favorite teacher).

As I get older, I realize how much of that I’ve carried with me throughout my life, though you could argue that my conditioning to be a people-pleaser preceded this incident. Regardless, that’s who I am now and I don’t think that is every going to change much, and I’m ok with that. I’m always going to (try to) be a people-pleaser, but I have been learning to let go a bit more and I’m constantly trying to remind myself that its ok to color outside the lines.

Our brains are pretty good at filling in blanks with the likely missing links, especially given enough context. This is important to a lot of communication, it’s the basis of much of scientific inquiry, and it is also a key part of what makes us human; we can fill in blanks with things that are objectively not present, but context tells us must exist.

A ghost must have turnout turned out the lights because I’m alone in the house. This year’s harvest was plentiful as a result of my sacrificial offering at the temple.

We do the same thing in our interactions with others. Sometimes (or probably all the time) we form ideas about other people or on certain events based on limited information without knowing the “objective” truth. Often times its those very assumptions that keep us from seeking the truth because we think we’ve already figured it out. I’ve always considered myself an open-minded person, but I constantly catch myself making assumptions about other people’s character based on limited interactions. Recognizing it in yourself and other people doesn’t make you immune, it’s only the first step. Step 2 is making an effort and listening.

When I was young, I was told that if hummingbirds stopped flapping their wings they would die, and for a long time I believed that. Thinking back I realize how ridiculous that would be if it were true, and what a tortured life it would be to be a hummingbird. Always needing to be on the go, literally because your life depends on it. Never being able to slow down. Never being able to stop, settle down, and rest.

I was sitting outside this morning and saw two hummingbirds chilling on the leaves of some giant birds-of-paradise, wings stowed at their sides. It made me happy.

When you’re fighting a monster it seems like the obvious thing to do, especially from an anthropocentric point of view. But what if there is no obvious head? Or what if going for the head isn’t actually the best thing to aim for (if playing Dark Souls for 2 weeks has taught me anything it’s this).

Sometimes the best way to defeat the monster is not to fuss over the ideal place to attack, but to just attack it wherever you possibly can and hope for the best.

I had another appointment with the psychologist last week and this time she indicated that she actually doesn’t think I have ADHD.

I agree with her (not that that necessarily matters), but I will say though that I do have an attention deficit of sorts. I think we all do. By I don’t mean that my attention is short, but that I have a tendency to “spend” more attention than I return. Every time an idea comes up or I think of something I need to do I make a tab (mentally or virtually); I spend some attention. This deficit results in a debt that just keeps growing to the point where all these things are running at low power in my head (or in my browser) taking up bits of my attention, however never enough individually to complete the task or pay off the debt, so collectively they add up to just a huge sum of unproductive processing.

The solution perhaps isn’t to ignore it or hide it away as I kinda suggested before, but rather to start paying those debts. One by one, address the things that have been on my mind, enough to satisfy the lender. Maybe I should start with the small stuff first so I don’t overdraft on the bigger ones.

For a long time scientists didn’t know what to do with lichens. Are they plant? Are the fungus? What are they? Some guy at one point suggested that they weren’t a single organism, but a collection of both fungus and algae/ cyanobacteria, living together. One provided protection and nutrients, the other provides the energy. This notion of two species coming together in a seemingly single organism was challenged by many at the time since it flew in the face of Darwin’s concept of divergent evolution that was just becoming widely accepted, but eventually a new term was created to describe the relationship between the species that make up lichen, and in turn all species that evolve convergently; symbiosis.

As unassuming as lichens are when you see them growing on rocks and trees on hikes, or really anywhere, they cover more of the Earth’s surface than tropical rainforests do (though perhaps these days, that is not such an impressive feat). Not only that, but many of them can survive the harsh conditions of space and Mars, unlike the majority of single-specied organisms.

Symbiosis allows these little cluster of organisms to go further than any other organism could manage alone. Our society is obsessed with competition and with weeding out what doesn’t work, which shockingly has led to the detriment of nearly every ecosystem on the planet. Maybe we should take a page from natural history’s playbook and focus a little more on lichenization.

I’ve quoted this many times before, but I’ll do it again cause it’s been so meaningful for me in various stages of my life and career: My Latin teacher in high school (shoutout to Davey) would say, Surround yourself with people who make you better, and who you make better. And since I can’t find an original source when I search for that exact phrase on Google, I’ll say that he was the man who said it first.

This idea was at the forefront of my mind yesterday during a session we had about healthcare disparities, specifically around maternal morbidity and mortality, and how in America, unlike most “developed” nations, maternal mortality has actually been increasing over the years. Unsurprisingly, due to injustices that exist (and have existed since our founding) in this country, this increase has disproportionately affected black women in America.

While I do want to talk about the data and some of the potential solutions we discussed in that session in another post, I just wanted to take some time to express my appreciation for the people in my class. I feel like in many cases it can be hard to motivate some students who were once premeds and who score as high in neuroticism as medical students do to talk about things that are not going to be “high yield” for upcoming exams, but when it comes to talking about real issues affecting vulnerable and marginalized people in our society the students in my cohort SHOW UP. They aren’t afraid to vocalize their thoughts and to challenge the status quo, and they do it articulately and with so much grace.

Not sure how much I can contribute to the second part of my teacher’s quote, but I will try to learn from example. Change is coming to healthcare in America, and I’m proud to be in the presence of the future physicians who are going to make that happen.