Past Selves

Last month Katherine called out the tension inherent in a “personal” website which is that it is both public and personal, and one’s public (or professional) persona is often different from that of their personal life. Robin Rendle riffed on the concept and said that it’s totally fine for personal websites to be messy or imperfect or weird (i.e., not necessarily how you’d want to present a “professional” front) and declared, in a pretty great and punchy/pithy statement, “You’re a poem and not software”....

After I quit medicine and went corporate (as corporate as tech startups can be, which I guess depends on your vantage point; for me it was and is extremely corporate coming from doctoring), I got really into it and became particularly fascinated to learn how business leaders operate and spend their time (at work and in life) in order to be the most efficient and effective they can be. I guess a lot of people who came up in corporate work (and maybe the culture at large which is often dictated by creatives who may pooh-pooh the corporate life) think MASSIVE EYEROLL when they hear what the latest tech bro thinkboi has to say about optimizing their life and their time, but I actually found it pretty refreshing that in business a spade is called a spade and that spade is a dollar and nobody pretends that we aren’t trying to make money....

One of the many open tabs in the browser of my mind is to find an effective way to track the television shows I watch. Unlike tracking books read or movies watched or music listened to, for which there are several good options for products to use1, I haven’t been able to find a good product for it. When I was on the internet in what could be considered my first act (a....

Lately I feel that more often I’d rather re-read a book I’ve already read before (and enjoyed) than pick up a new one. Maybe it’s a form of risk aversion (I don’t know if I’m going to like a new book, so I’d rather read an old one). Maybe it’s something that comes with aging. I’ve always loved reading books, since I was a kid and my parents would take me to the library and every single time I would check out the maximum number of books (thirty)1, read them all, return them within the two-week checkout period, and check out another 30....

This past weekend I met up with a few of my former colleagues from residency for dinner and drinks. It felt a little bit like a meetup with high school friends might feel, if you spent high school removing gallbladders and incising and draining abscesses. (Maybe you did. I don’t know your life.) Having a chance to confront and reflect on my former self in a controlled environment—in this case, a contemporary Mexican restaurant—was not a bad exercise....

Yesterday one of my colleagues in a (virtual) meeting reportedly picked up a canister of coarse sea salt, announced “I’m just snacking,” and proceeded to eat the salt, which confused and maybe frightened the other meeting attendees. It reminded me of the time I was rounding with my interns and medical students in the recovery room after scrubbing out of a long case and I was hungry so I pulled an apple out of my white coat pocket, ate most of it, noticed that there weren’t any trash cans close by, and so I ate the core and seeds as well and then deposited the stem in the breast pocket of my white coat to discard later....

June 2021 marks my eleventh year in New York City. I wasn’t supposed to be here this long. The Plan™ was never to stay in New York for this long. The Plan™ was to come here for five years to learn how to be a surgeon, then go back to Chicago and be a surgeon and live happily ever after. When I was younger, I didn’t think that carefully about my future, which is kind of terrifying to think about now, how I made decisions about my life without really thinking about them....

As some of you have heard, I recently resigned from surgical residency, and am leaving clinical medicine. Ten years ago, I decided to be a doctor. It was a decision that made perfect sense at the time: I wanted to help people who were suffering, and I was fortunate to have the ability and resources to gain entry into medical school. I wasn’t sure which specialty would be my calling, but shortly after starting my clinical rotations I fell in love with surgery....