A stormy weekend between ending residency and starting fellowship. I was angry, burnt out, terrified. Resentful of Beginnings. Told that I was a faculty member in the role of a research fellow. Not a research fellow who practices medicine as a faculty member. It was a distinction that changed everything.
How did I really want to spend these two years? The years Before. The years Before a CHILD Changes Everything.
Alternate Ellie #1: The Journalist
Human Rights Journalist. Writing about vulnerability and poverty and the human capacity for violence and forgiveness, apathy and activism and the inherent loneliness in life. Traveling around the world illuminating the cruel injustice of inequality.
Alternate Ellie #2: The Writer
A novelist, carefully crafting a collection of stories rooted in a child’s journey through adolescence and into adulthood. A narrative of mental illness and love, a reflection on the complicated evolution of empathy. A narrative that celebrates and reflects on both the impossible beauty of Uganda and the melancholy of a country road in Central Pennsylvania. A narrative filled with the silences of death, isolation, and a broken heart. A narrative filled with Life. My story.
Alternate Ellie #3: The Doctor
Competent, confident, directed. Continuing Education. Sexually transmitted infections. But not HIV. Sexual trauma. Pregnancy terminations. Family Planning. Ensuring reproductive rights and human rights through clinical skill. Practicing Public Health.
Alternate Ellie #4: The Researcher
In the field. Ethnographer. Medical anthropologist. Documenting the experience of refugees negotiating the development of identity across cultures. Examining the effects of public art on the empowerment of communities. Evaluating innovative approaches to health, helping to create population-based definitions of wellness that reflect culture and the incredibly complicated evolution of inter-generational relationships in migrating families.
Alternate Ellie #5: The Student
Public Health School. Finally. I can inhale knowledge. Rediscover the world with different eyes. Total immersion. Responsible for only myself.
The truth is that I am just barely hanging on. I am not Alternate Ellie #1-5.
I am Me. I am struggling to keep up with my clinic notes, literally haunted by patient-related anxiety. Trying to deal with the theoretical disappointment that I will never be the Journalist, the Doctor, or the Researcher. My courage stubbornly fighting against the increasing desire to use these two years to become The Writer. Impatiently waiting to become The Student.
And so it has begun. the Fellowship. And it is going.
Globe Napper 