Is it real or not.

I wonder if I'd be feeling this way now.
Naming the artifacts in front of me.

Last night: 2:17am
I awoke. It felt as if I'd not slept at all, like someone sucked strength from me while I slept.
I feel weak, shaky, my heart is fast.
What is wrong with me? My mind begins a list.

Some of my fiber realizes I have a chance to be more than I could've imagined a decaded ago. When I was 19, I was scared, as now, but for different reasons. Fear has ruled my mind for as far back as 4th grade.

What if?

So I find myself under enormous pressures. Keep up with the material in medical school, that barely gives you a day between tests to regroup. And it gets worse, right? Clerkships that are burtal, long days, bordes and the months of studying. People will expect things from you, great things. People will talk if you are not there, if you need time, if you don't "cut it".

So I worry about it all, and in the deep recesses of my brain doubt lies in wait for night.

hence I am up at 2:17am. I listen to podcasts of Car Talk and Living on Earth, and dip in and out of conciousness until 4am when I sucome to my exhaustion. 5:45am, up again with that same feeling of sudden wakefulness, weakness, something being wrong. I got 6hrs of choppy sleep.

So is something physically wrong with me? What is happening when I sleep? Am I sick? The answer to all that is No, apparently. I have a heart murmer, I have beta-thalessemia, but I am healthy. I think.

What makes me sick is worry. I really is an amazingly potent agent.

So what do I do? It gets worse and then what?

I think that reevaluating my reasons for pursuing a degree in medicine will by therapeutic. I know I am putting myself through this for a good reason.

Better.

I still have a basal level of fear, still cannot rationalize my thoughts, widdling them down to harmless rounded stumps. They are still sharp to a point that pierces my mind and scares me into doing what I otherwise might not, or preventing me from doing what I know I should.

The study of medicine as yeilded a new understanding of what is fragile. "Fragility, thy name in woman." the famous line in Hamlet reads. If Shakespeare were only able to know what I do: that fragility's name should be human.

Everyday in school I am confronted with new malaties and little reverence for the normal homeostasis of the human condition. The is so much wrong with our environment and some much to go wrong with our bodies. How can I be hopeful? Is this all we are? Sick or destinted to be sick. Souless and existing but to die? The natural world may be as simple as an answer could be, displaying a response in the commonality of every living thing: to reproduce. Though, for me this offers no sucker. This world seems to be dying, so my seed will not count. It is sad, but it seems to all be dying.

So what to do? I hear, in the same sour and defeated breath that utters death and hopelessness, whispers of life. What do you do with your time here, Matt? Lament your morality. Who told you that wrong tales about life. No cycles, no natural cycles in these storiesL: I was raised to see dying as unnatural. I was raised Christian. What haunting, yet enticing oft repeated line was "Thou shalt now parish, but have ever-lasting life."