so i'm rounding up on three weeks being here in sunny los angeles - although to be perfectly honest, i've pretty much stuck to the west side of the city (westwood, santa monica, venice...), and i've just finished up my neonatal intensive care unit rotation. next week i start in pediatrics.
sometimes, when i think about just how much my life has changed in the last month, i almost have to laugh. a month ago, i had just left morocco - it's beautifully complicated culture that challenged me to step up every single day and embrace the differences in life that make humanity the beautiful conglomeration that it is. i was in paris with my roommate lauren sharing gorgeous days wandering the city of light and love, experiencing it from the ground level - walking everywhere, people watching, and just living without really a care in the world. and now i'm here, smack in the middle of westwood - that ucla bubble right next to beverly hills and the sunset strip - how did that happen?
my apartment is insanely nice completely furnished including a large kitchenette, a super comfy bed, and a leather couch. upstairs, on the roof, one can easily find the little pool and deck chairs for relatively private sunning any time of the day surrounded by high rises and the constant honking and beeping of traffic.
the hospital is only a five minute walk away making the morning commute ideal, and i wonder if i'm being spoiled for anything else after graduation...
work itself has been amazing. the ucla staff definitely deserve their ranking as the third best in the nation, and as a student, i have felt almost instantly welcomed on to the healthcare team - a sensation relatively lacking in my east-coast hospital experiences on clinical days. i've shared tender and intimate moments with my patients and their families. i've cried - at the birth of one infant and the tragic death of another. i've jumped into this experience with both feet, and i don't regret it for one moment.
but that same longing for something, somewhere else is still there. as i sit in the middle of this concrete jungle, surrounded by all of the cute little coffee shops and restaurants i could ever ask for, i long for something...something else.
it's hard to put it into words. part of it is the community from which i have been separated for quite some time. the last time i really felt this kind of loneliness (the kind when you're surrounded by heaps of people, but just not really known by anyone) was my freshman year at university. part of it is just a chafing at my environment. in a neighborhood that exists mainly to serve the ucla student population, the streets are full of people single-mindedly going about their days. i don't really know how to explain it, and at the risk of sounding like a huge hippie, i miss the earth. after spending the semester in rural morocco, whiling away spare time hiking across the countryside, overwhelmed by the grandeur of rugged mountains and stony desert plains and expansive fields of tender, green wheat, i feel constrained by the man-made structures around me. the few green spaces i have found seem all too engineered, carefully plotted and planned to be both economical and aesthetically pleasing.
in a place which prides itself on a freedom of mind and spirit, a liberality that extends to all areas of life, i feel oddly boxed-in - as if that freedom really looks like this and acts like that and everything else just doesn't quite fit in.
in the end, all of this essentially leaves with this odd sense of yearning, but for what, i haven't quite figured out. for friends? family? freedom? faith? i'm not exactly sure. but i'm looking forward, in some ways, to the journey i'm on to figure it out.
#Firstworldproblems in Haiti?
11 years ago
