I broke one of my rules.
Rule #5 explicitly states: "If your insurance is kind enough to cover mental health, TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT! It is not because you are sick or damaged or need to "get better," but because the closest person in your life will not always be available to support you and listen to you, and a lot of the emotional work may fall on your shoulders. A good therapist can go a long way in making the residency experience easier to bear." Apparently your therapist's maternity leave is not a valid excuse to stop going to therapy, even temporarily, at a time when your world feels like it's falling apart.
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It didn't take me long to learn one of the top ten lessons for surthriving residency: to "find a tribe." Participation in a tribe, or community, though a meaningful part of any healthy lifestyle, becomes an absolute necessity when your better half is absent. The relative value of that tribe increases with every compounded variable, whether it's a cross-country move, moving to a place with few existing connections, a spouse in one of the more demanding residences (they're all demanding, but some are more arduous than others), or, you know, all of the above.
In New York, community serves a secondary function: to make the city a little smaller and more manageable. As we prepared for our move someone told me that even though New York is a huge city, it begins to shrink the moment you settle into your neighborhood and your routines. Finding your routes and your haunts, your favorite coffee shops and 99-cent stores, that bar you go to with one friend and the restaurant you go to with another, these are the things that turn The Big Apple into something more bite-sized. Even in How I Met Your Mother, the characters agreed New York City was The Best Place On Earth™ while sitting at the same booth in the same bar night after night. The truth is that Manhattan or Brooklyn or the Bronx might be where you live, but your neighborhood is your home. It should come as no surprise, then, that upon arriving in Brooklyn I had one very singular goal: to find a community. J and I recently bought a new couch to replace his old one that was, shall I say, well loved. It was so well loved that it didn't sit much higher than a futon, and you could feel the springs under the cushion if you sat down too fast. Since we're living on a training budget in Brooklyn we try to avoid major expenses like new furniture, but I was finally able to convince him it was time to say his goodbyes to his sofa and welcome a new one into our home. As we hemmed and hawed over whether or not we should spring for the protection plan (we did; I'm a slob), he did a quick Google search for median salaries in his field, just to reassure us that someday this won't seem like such a big deal. The purchase, that is, not his mild case of disposophobia.
More often than not, instead of actually spending money on things for our home we just talk about the wonderful home we'll have when he is done with training and we're settled down. It's little more than a fun game, a way for us to make light of the circumstances we unwittingly find ourselves in. But I also find it a particularly useful exercise when things just don't seem to be going according to plan, whether it's because of some emotional trauma or because I burned myself on the radiator that is unavoidably too close to my side of the bed. In addition to helping me cope it's also a reminder that I won't always live in an apartment built without a single 90-degree angle, or that someday I'll have a closet that fits both my winter sweaters and summer blouses simultaneously. My family likes to remind me to dream big because, after all, I'm married to a doctor! So here it is: |
AuthorNashira is a music teacher and proud Small-Town Jew who, after surthriving six years in Brooklyn for her husband's surgical residency, is finally back in Wisconsin where she belongs! At least until the end of the two-year surgical fellowship, that is. It's a wild ride, and she's ready to tell you all about it! Archives
September 2019
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