Beyond Romance
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I don’t want to say I had a moment of clarity, but I suppose if it happened, then this was the day. Or at least that’s what I tell people who ask me about my decision to give up medicine. The thing is, I knew I wanted to write before then; that wasn’t a sudden revelation, but something more gradual and organic.
It came with age in part—not in a “get over it” sense but as I gained a little distance from my experiences on the wards and became more reflective. As I grew, so did my awareness of things other than medicine.
When you’ve lived with death every single day for five years—even after that length of time, it still feels like an ongoing reality rather than some abstract concept—it has a way of seeping into your everyday existence.
It’s easy to be drawn in by the romantic notions of writing, or medicine for that matter. But if you spend too much time around those things, you start to see them less in their proper place and more as some kind of holy grail you must attain, and then they lose much of their appeal.
They can be hard work. Medicine can be draining and frustrating at times, but it always felt like a worthy challenge—not because I needed to prove myself to others but because I genuinely enjoyed the process. It was rewarding.
Writing? Sometimes, yes, but not always, and I started to feel more and more like a fraud when I wrote and nothing happened—a charlatan whose fancy words hid nothing beyond her own insecurities.
In the end, it was my love of writing that saved me. If I hadn’t been such an obsessive reader and had a burning need to be part of that world, then maybe I wouldn’t have given up. I think the reason I was able to do so and still write is that my mind wasn’t completely closed off to medicine anymore; I had no choice but to be open-minded when I returned to the wards as a student.
As I’ve gotten older, I realize how precious those moments were that allowed me to see both sides of life, the dark, and the light. When I’m reading now, I try to appreciate all the details—the tiny nuances, the emotions on the page. I think that’s helped me grow as a writer.
I may not be in my twenties anymore, but I am grateful to be living life again rather than being caught in an endless cycle of medical school—which was what I feared would happen if I didn’t give up.
When I first moved to New York after leaving medical school, I thought I’d find inspiration for my writing somewhere in that urban jungle. But I realized it was just too noisy and crowded. It was too easy to lose focus. I needed the tranquility that came with the suburbs.
There’s something about growing up in the countryside that helps you to develop a different perspective on things.
And while I don’t think there are any answers for why I felt the way I did or what compelled me to make a decision I’d never considered before, I’m sure that coming from a place where life felt slow and gentle gave me a better foundation for my thoughts than someone who grew up in a big city.
I was twenty-five when I quit medicine, which seems like a pretty late age to do so, even though I had no real desire to be a doctor for at least five years before that. I’m almost thirty now. That sounds strange to say when I look back at my old life as a physician; I don’t know how it feels to be twenty-five anymore, or what it’s like to be anywhere near my twenties now.
I was in my early twenties when I first started medical school and then worked in hospitals for another two years—so it’s been nearly nine years since then.
It doesn’t feel strange to be this age. I don’t feel old or anything close to it. It’s only recently that people have stopped asking if I’m twenty-eight—it’s as if I’m still trying to convince them I’m older than I really am. I used to think that was silly. Why would they want me to be younger?
And yet it’s hard to explain how much of my identity comes from the experiences I’ve had—whether they happened yesterday or years ago. When you reach a certain age, the time has a way of catching up with you.
I guess the idea is that I’m still young enough to write stories that appeal to people in their twenties but not too old to be writing those same stories again. It’s an odd sensation, this thing we call growing old.
My family was a little skeptical about my decision. Some relatives asked what I was doing with my life—not because they wanted an answer or anything; it’s just that they didn’t want to seem unsupportive. Other people told me it was a bad idea—that it was too soon to be done with medicine and that I should keep on studying instead, especially after I’d gone through so much.
But I knew what I wanted, and while my family worried for me, they also understood that this wasn’t some impulsive move; it was something that I needed. So they didn’t press me too hard about it, and my father helped me by giving me time off work for a year. I spent it writing—which, if you think about it, is kind of weird when you think about it, right?
But that was exactly what I wanted. I didn’t want to waste a single day away from my computer, not one moment more than I absolutely had to. That was when I found that being an author is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. It felt as though it were my fate. And maybe it is.
I’ll never know whether there are other options out there that I might have been meant to explore. Maybe medicine would have turned out to be exactly what I thought it was—and yet I don’t regret the fact that I made the choice that led me here.
After a few months, I decided to come back home and take some time off—not to start working on new books but just to spend some time at the bookstore. My mother wasn’t thrilled about that, and my brother was pretty upset, but he was supportive once he learned where I planned on going.
The bookstore felt like my home now. That place has seen a lot of change in my life. It was always there during the times when I needed something stable and dependable in my life, and yet it’s also changed along with me over the years. When I moved to New York for medical school, it was a place I looked forward to coming back to.
Even when I lived in the city, I came here to relax whenever I could. There are all these new customers who come into the store every day. They’re young people—college students mostly—who are excited to buy books for the first time and to read them while they go back to their campuses, or people who work nearby who can’t wait to spend a few hours reading something in English.
There are all these kinds of people who come and look through the shelves at the new releases, the classics, the bestsellers. And there are still people like me—people who know exactly what they want and how to find it without needing anything explained to them. But most importantly, I feel at home there.
There are some people who think my life would have been better if I’d kept on practicing medicine—if I had tried again if I had given it one last shot after I quit. It seems like such an odd thing to ask someone who’s gone through all that I have: why would you give up so quickly?
I guess some people are always waiting for me to tell them more about this whole quitting-medicine thing—they’re eager to hear how and why I decided to become a writer. I’m not sure whether my reasons matter or not. It’s like asking me what my favorite color is or which book I think is the best one I’ve ever written.
The answer’s never going to change. I might say that the newest book I read last month was my favorite of all time, but that doesn’t mean I’ll suddenly hate all other books now that I’ve experienced something different.
And just as the books I like will stay with me forever, so will all the memories associated with my time at the bookstore. This store feels like part of my life. Maybe it’s strange, but it really has.
When I look back at that first day, I can see how things were destined to happen. When I think about how I was working on a manuscript then, I wonder if it could be possible to have felt more certain than I did about something else in my life.
It sounds crazy—but when you’ve lived your life feeling unsure of everything, maybe it’s only natural that you’d finally feel as though you know exactly where you need to be and what you need to do. I don’t really care what people think, but at the same time, I can understand the question, so I guess it makes sense to me why they ask about it.
But no, I don’t regret what I’ve done. I’m happy. I think my family worries because it seems like every time I go somewhere, something bad happens. I don’t want that to be true. They know it wasn’t their fault, and so does my brother, but I think they still feel like something was bound to happen like I was asking for it somehow.
That’s how it seems. Maybe I really was, in some way. I’m sure everyone thinks that at times, but who knows?
I was in here a couple of months ago, reading The Book Thief and eating a cookie, when a guy came into the store looking for a copy of a book written by someone called Eileen Myles. I told him we had none on the shelves, and that the author was dead.
“That’s not right,” he said to me. “I’ve got a signed copy here.” He put his hand into his coat pocket and showed me the proof of purchase he had inside, along with his driver’s license. It looked genuine enough; the book was a collector’s item anyway, and there were only two copies left in existence.
So I rang up his purchase, wrote the date on the receipt, and gave him the change—a twenty-dollar bill. And he took the book out of the bag and handed it to me: the first one he’d read since high school. His fingers were trembling as he held onto the book, and the look in his eyes said he’d never expected anything like this to happen to him.
When I asked him what it was about, he told me he didn’t know and didn’t want to ruin the experience for himself, that it was better for him if he couldn’t find out until the end.
“That’s fair enough,” I said. I put the book back in his hands. “Enjoy it.”
He thanked me before leaving the store, and he walked off in a daze like he couldn’t quite believe the words coming out of his mouth. I thought about asking him where he lived so that I could send him a signed copy of my next novel once I published it, but I figured he wouldn’t really want something like that from me.
So instead, I put the receipt in an envelope along with the change, along with a note saying thank you and hoping that he would enjoy the rest of his day, and then I sent them to him through the post office. Maybe he found the book, or maybe it turned out that he’d never bought it at all.
I’ll probably never know. I guess that’s the risk that comes with reading books and talking to people—it’s not always clear if they’re true or fake or somewhere in between. I just hope he liked the story, though. He seemed like he really needed some happy endings right then.
I’m thinking now that if there’s someone who could possibly be able to answer the question my family asks, it might be her. It’s hard for me to think she has no idea what my life is like because it feels like I’d be telling a lie if I tried to deny it.
The person I care most about in the world knows more about what I do than anyone else in my life, and yet at the same time, I’ve spent a lot of years feeling as though she doesn’t understand how much I’m capable of caring for her, either.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s just that she thinks I’m lying about everything or if maybe it’s that I haven’t explained myself very well to her. If only I knew how to do that, I could make her understand why my life seems so important.
Maybe one day I’ll get another call from my mother. Maybe it’ll come on a day when I feel like talking.
The End