write Morning Pages every day – oh no, just two (yesterday and today).
don’t look at phone until after Morning Pages – once, just today.
do an Artist Date – yes, two actually. As mentioned in this week’s Artist’s Way Reflections column post, I spent an hour listening to music and sorting through my clothes, and I’m counting it. I did one this morning too. I went to “The Differentialists,” a weekly meeting organized by some classmates where we go through and try to figure out medical mysteries, which is aligned with my imaginary life in Week Two of The Artist’s Way of being House. It was the most fun out of any Artist Date I’ve done in a long time.
clean my apartment – it’s gotten totally out of control and I have to move in less than a month so yeah – yes, finally. It was really stressing me out.
SPRING 2021 UPDATE to this post from September 2020: I’m going back to medical school. We got a new dean who’s willing to work with me (a low bar, I know) and she genuinely seems pretty great and really invested in the disability part of the job). We’ve sorted out some tricky issues (rural rotation, EHR access, rotation planning). It’s still an ongoing process, and still has a lot of battles currently and looming ahead, but at least for now, I’m back. I missed medicine a lot, and was also kinda bored out of my gourd even with tons of projects going on, so all that plus the new dean and I’m a student again, as of April 26.
You might say “I come back stronger than a ’90s trend.”
Also, my coming back doesn’t negate any of the absolute BS that led to my leaving, and so with that, I leave you the original post, unabridged, below:
Since this post is a sequel to that one, I’m posting the lyric video again.
In “exile” from folklore, Taylor Swift and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver are singing to and about an ex-lover. For me, the song has taken on a totally different, personal meaning.
It’s held steady as my favorite song on folklore (with many others way, way up there, at this moment the next closest has to be “the lakes”) because the whole concept of exile seems to fit my life right now. Even if it’s (semi) self-imposed.
For me the you of the song isn’t an ex, isn’t a lover, isn’t a person at all.
It’s medical school. It’s medical training as a whole. It’s the medical education industrial complex.
In The Artist’s Way, the seminal book on creativity, author Julia Cameron introduces two Basic Tools, after the introduction and before the week-by-week chapters. These two Basic Tools, she says, are the cornerstone to connecting with creativity.
The first is Morning Pages, discussed in last week’s Artist’s Way Reflections column, the practice of writing three handwritten pages of whatever comes to mind every morning. I’ve wrestled with these pages, but ultimately find them to be helpful, a way to connect to what I’m actually feeling, which isn’t always easy but is in its own way grounding. They’re also a good source of fresh ideas, a way to puzzle through problems and often a place to dump the mental waste before starting the day.
The second Basic Tool is the Artist Date. You’re supposed to go on a “date” with your artist self once a week. Do something fun for an hour and no one else is allowed to come along. Quality time with your creative side.
And I’m going to be real. I get the theory behind it, it all sounds great when Julia Cameron extols the values of an Artist Date. But in actuality, I hate it.
NOTE: This is not a new post. This post is from April 2018. I was looking to link to it and found I’d taken it down, reverted it to a draft (I also found a bunch more drafts of posts I thought were published in there, oooops). I guess I took it down once I decided to go to medical school, bury the evidence of my ambivalence.
So, yeah, spoiler alert: I went.
Here’s the post from April 2018:
There’s an episode in Season 7 of Gilmore Girls where Lorelai has to write a character reference to Luke. When she tells Rory that she can’t write the letter, they have this exchange:
Rory: Sounds like you’re overthinking this. Maybe if you just put pen to paper.
Lorelai: I tried that, I thought, “I’ll just sit down and write whatever comes – no judgment, no inner critic.” Boy was that a bad idea.
Lorelai: Because my brain is a wild jungle full of scary gibberish. “I’m writing a letter, I can’t write a letter, why can’t I write a letter? I’m wearing a green dress, I wish I was wearing my blue dress, my blue dress is at the cleaner’s. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue, ‘Casablanca’ is such a good movie. Casablanca, the White House, Bush. Why don’t I drive a hybrid car? I should really drive a hybrid car. I should really take my bicycle to work. Bicycle, unicycle, unitard. Hockey puck, rattlesnake, monkey, monkey, underpants!”
Rory: Hockey puck, rattlesnake, monkey, monkey, underpants?
Lately, like for the last month, my brain feels like hockey puck, rattlesnake, monkey monkey underpants.
I had my first medical school interview a few days ago, and I feel like cataloguing my experiences here, as a way to both share the experience I’m going through in applying to medical school as a non-traditional applicant with a disability, and also as a way to collect some of my impressions in one place.
To back up a little, I applied this summer. After my final final exam as an undergraduate (physical chemistry), later that afternoon I started filling out the application. No rest for the determined. I submitted my application in July, applying to 19 schools. This sounds like a lot (and it is) but I know people who’ve applied to double that many. In September 2016, I sat down with my finances to plan out how much I needed to have saved for each step of the process and had determined that if I met those goals, I could apply to ~18 schools. So pretty much on target.
I just realized I never updated my site with the results.
Scores for my test date came out on Oct 27th, a little bit after noon and very soon after I got off of work. I was still at my workplace (a tutoring center) and everyone was busy, so I was just walking around the office, pulling up the scores on my phone.
Here are the results: Needless to say, I’m over the moon about my score. And hugely relieved that I don’t need to tackle this beast of a test ever again.
I’m also really, really grateful to all the people who helped with this, and all the events that fell into place, like winning a prep course I never could’ve afforded, my boss letting me basically take the month before the test completely off, the people who helped me get accommodations, all the people who helped me understand physics better, all the people who were understanding when I wasn’t all that available this summer and early fall, the people who knew exactly when a much-needed break was mandatory and invited me out to do things, all the encouragement and support that people around me offered (via text, long phone calls, emails, conversations), all the professors that gave me a solid background in the sciences, and whatever luck allowed me to get a verbal score that was better than my practice tests.
When I got my score, I was in shock. I won’t lie, I expected to get a good score, I knew I had solid understanding of the subjects (tutoring a lot of them was a major help), but there seemed to be so many factors in all of the sections that I really was preparing myself to get a lower score than predicted, and had told myself I would not retake anything over a 510. So to get a score that high, I was kind of in shock. I still remember after I first checked it, trying to write my first text to tell someone and my hands shaking so much I couldn’t get the text out right away.
This past weekend, I celebrated with a karaoke party, which was a total blast!
In my last post, about registering to take the MCAT this September, I mentioned that I was originally going to take it two years ago but was denied the accommodations I requested. It’s a much longer story than that, and it’s a battle I need to gear up for once again.
And that’s a topic I want to tackle a bit here. People who know me in real life know that I hardly ever use any sort of accommodations on tests. I want to be treated like everyone else, take the tests in the class with everyone else. And if I could have done that with the MCAT, I would’ve.
Earlier this week, I registered for the MCAT. I’ll be taking it on September 23, 2015.
Trying to insert a Countdown Clock but it’s not working. Just one more reason I might switch over to WordPress.org instead of WordPress.com.
I was thinking that, among other topics, I might post about the whole ordeal of preparing for the test and then taking it. I figured it’s sort of a unique situation–you don’t get a ton of blind and visually-impaired people taking that test–so hopefully it’ll be interesting to people. I can only hope.
Here it is, the final installment in this trilogy of posts about a recent crazy creative journey (Read Part 1 – The High and Part 2 – Coming Down here) of writing a crazy screenplay called (for now anyway) Sweet Acid. Not that the journey of writing this screenplay is over–I still have tons of editing to do, and then need to figure out what I want to do with it–but that the crazy emotional creativity roller coaster has subsided.
And as for what got me back to normal? It’s nothing shocking. I think just about every working writer or artist or creative person in any field has said this. The cure for all that insane intensity–the good, the bad, the swinging between the extremes–is to keep doing the work.
And in a certain way, it’s still there. I’m still excited about the project and had a great time talking about it yesterday with the friend who my character Lenne is based on. But I also experienced the other side of the creative process, the doubt and self-loathing, the coming down off the drug-like high of creating.
The crash came along with writing the end of the first draft of the screenplay. Maybe it was just the fact that the initial mad dash creative side of the project was over. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel excited about this project so much as terrified.
Goals from Last Week – How Did it Go?
In 
I had my first medical school interview a few days ago, and I feel like cataloguing my experiences here, as a way to both share the experience I’m going through in applying to medical school as a non-traditional applicant with a disability, and also as a way to collect some of my impressions in one place.
Needless to say, I’m over the moon about my score. And hugely relieved that I don’t need to tackle this beast of a test ever again.
April Julia 