Living in a Truer World

Living in a Truer World

I'm already in the fourth year of studying medicine. It really felt like it wasn't too long ago I was a naive medical student, with simple goals and unadulterated optimism. Everything was so much simpler back then, or so it seemed to me. It was as if the world had less shades of grey - one could step on one tone of grey and manage not to touch other kinds of tone painted just beside.


The medicine I see now - more accurately the world that I see now through my eyes - is so much richer of greyness. Like a grey-scale photo of a sunset by a beach, there are all sorts of whiteness and blackness. In the far distance, the brilliant white sun is slowly gliding down its arc and the sky enveloping it has a beautiful gradient of grey, becoming darker as it is closer to you. Specks of the sun's reflection on the calm distant sea ceaselessly surface and sink out of sight, creating a wonderful spectacle that could be stared for hours until they all disappear together with the day's eye. The rocks closest to the observer has the darkest of black - their delicate bumps and lines absolutely hidden by the shadow of their own bodies - leaving only an odd collection of silhouette.


It is now nearly impossible to touch on a single shade of grey. Life is increasingly "colourful" but at the same time also increasingly complex.


You will see the world as closer to the truth, but it is not always pretty. Truth can be sweet, and it can be bitter. Hell, it can be anything. There aren't a lot of things existing in binary; you realise pairs of two are difficult to find. There is no such thing as "male" and "female" only, because there are people who sit in between, either biologically born as such or otherwise. Sexual orientation is never either "heterosexuality" or "homosexuality". The universe is never simply divided into "heaven" and "earth". Darkness and lightness are a spectrum, as are highs and lows, and hot and cold. Most anything are created as a continuum.


The natural law dictates that this world that we live in can never be as simple as a world of binary - either one or the other. The sooner we all realise binary rarely exist, the better. But this is difficult as many people cling tightly to the illusion of the 'either-or' world due to its simplicity. It makes things somehow easier to comprehend. However, illusion is but an illusion, and no amount of denial can change that fact.


I have shattered the illusion and I am happy to live in this difficult world.


Medicine is one of the many tools I came across in my life that would eventually be used to break the glass. It is a great instrument, but wielding it also changes you. Many who crossed to the other side into the truth shed layers of optimism. Breaking the glass makes shards of cynicism pierce deep into their flesh, and they burrow deeper as if trying to integrate themselves with the body.


I am still struggling to pick up the pieces off the floor and remove the sharp fragments from my flesh. It's hard but I will become the person I sought out to be when I first started medical training. I will get there.

---------------------------

(credits to Chibss @ deviantART)