Kusala A.

Photo provided by Kusala A.

If you’re reading this, it is okay to go home – wherever home is for you. 

Think of the walk back from the library, when the street lights are on and the sidewalks are sparse; a dense cloud sits at your temples. You have finished studying for the day. The walk should be a reprieve, sedative, but instead it is laden with the reminders of all that is left to do. 

Or consider the subway ride back to your apartment on a Sunday night, after dinner with your childhood friends. You laughed, caught up, and enjoyed yourself. But somewhere between the restaurant, and the jutting of the train on the tracks, your mind has moved to Monday. You are already bracing for the calendar of what this week harbors. 

I have come to know that this feeling of unrest permeates through the fabric of our lives, grazing even the good memories. We occasionally find ourselves feeling like the days and moments we look forward to are sandwiched between the onus of our responsibilities. 

It is easy to forget that we are allowed to stop. 

For me, home has taken many forms. In fact, home has been anything that reminds me to take three deep breaths and feel my feet on something solid. In my life, it has been a flight to Colorado, old friends’ dining tables, meditation, my twin sister, a pint of vanilla ice cream. Finding home, and moving towards it, has broken me from the narrowness of my own thoughts, and dissipated the pressure of the day-to-day. 

Home, as I have come to understand it, is less about where and more about what it provides. In the literal sense, I have travelled home many times. Some for joy, and some by choice, and many by circumstance. I flew home to grieve for a loved one. To celebrate my dad turning 60 years old. To give my sister a hug when she needed me. 

There are many reasons to have not been home in a while. Maybe there is no time or there are not enough resources. Perhaps it is more difficult to take a pause and process the moment than it is to pass through it. However, home, just like family, can be wondrous, or complicated, or difficult; but it must fulfill my requirement of being bigger than my thoughts. Home doesn’t need to be peaceful, it just needs to be grounding; transport me outside a singular stress and maybe divert me towards another. 

Like spending time in Central Park with a novel, which reminds me there are crevices in my brain that don’t have to exist in the past, or the future, or even carry the load of the present. Or hearing my own labored breathing as I work my way uphill on a challenging hike. Neither the novel or the hike solve anything waiting for me. But somehow, that is precisely the point. Sometimes, what we need is not a solution, but rather a shift in perspective.

And when we take the time to abandon the mundane in our lives to focus on the people we love, we begin to learn the details of another’s days: their routines, familiar routes, and the small habits that we may otherwise have never noticed. 

What a joy it is to be grounded. To call your best friend who lives hundreds of miles away, or get on that red-eye back to your mother, or go to a nearby park where you can hear the trees rustling in the same exact way they used to behind your middle school. 

We spend so much of our lives trying to get somewhere. Our responsibilities will always find us. But it is crucial to remember that we need to take some time to water the flowers of our people, our places, our own minds, so that one day we have a garden to stop and smell. It is imperative that we become experts in where we belong, and we make our way there every so often. 

And there are moments in life where you have to go home. 

Just to do laundry. 

Kusala A., Second Year Medical Student

Several studies have revealed that medical students, physicians, and healthcare professionals experience mental health symptoms at rates significantly higher than the general population. Stethos[Cope] is a chapter of IfYoureReadingThis designed to help medical students and professionals cope with the unique stressors of medical training and change the narrative of mental health in medicine.

To read more letters and interviews from students, and to learn more about mental health in the medical community, visit the Stethos[Cope] home page.