Well, if you read my last post, you know I went skiing yesterday. Unfortunately for me, I went off a jump and absolutely ATE IT. Several hours later, I left the ER with cast for my broken thumb and a knee immobilizer for my torn MCL. We love to see it.

I’m going skiing in the morning.

Growing up, I was dragged out of my bed at 6 am Saturday and Sunday during the winter by my dad; he is a first chair to last chair kind of guy. He always has beef jerky in his front jacket pocket for lunch. My sister and I always thought we had won the lottery on days where we convinced him to buy us hot chocolate and fries in the lodge afterwards. That lodge always smelled like 60 year old sweat and something wafting up from the bathroom downstairs. MRG, ski it if you can!

It wasn’t until college when I found that skiing could be enjoyable with friends; what a foreign concept to me. I could get a beer in the lodge after? I could take 30 minutes and eat lunch? While I credit my dad for giving me the steezy skill set to show a bunch of jersey-sporting, PBR-carrying boys that I could handle myself in the woods, I was able to rediscover how much I loved skiing when I was with my friends.

Here’s where it gets a little tricky. Yes, it involves my ex. Yeah, yeah, I know I bring him up a lot (we’re working on that). When we first started hanging out, it was the deadass middle of winter, and what else is there to do but yeet yourself down a mountain?? Slowly but surely, I showed him all my favorite ski spots in the woods over the course of an entire season. He kept up, showed me some new tricks, and one time even rescued me when I face-planted into a stream. And then that was it, we stopped talking and when I went back to the mountain the next year, it felt like I was missing my ski buddy. Out of all my friends that I dragged along to the mountain with me, he always made me feel that someone was watching out for me.

Eventually I ran into him that next season and we reconnected through skiing. I won’t lie (even though I’d love to), it felt even more intoxicating than all those Fireball nips that we’d shoot on the lift in college. There he was again, looking over his shoulder for me in the woods, digging me out of a tree, taking me to the park to watch me wreck myself on a rail for the first time. And then, yet again, it ended (for real this time).

I’m going to the mountain tomorrow. It’s a new season. I know he’ll be there, somewhere on the mountain. Maybe in my favorite spots that I showed him along the way. It’s such a strange feeling to know that we’ll likely be there at the same time, but not together. Instead, I’ll be avoiding everyone in a green jacket, wondering if it’s him every time I see one go by.

At least the PBR and pocket beef jerky will always be there for me.

I’d like to start by saying a big screw you to whomever put it out there that you’d stop breaking out in your twenties.

Ok now that that’s out of the way, here’s a comprehensive guide to running into your ex at the gym.

Step 1: take pre-workout. Yeah ok it might give you a slight palpitation but that’s the whole point.

Step 2: Big Bootie Mix 11. Or 16. Definitely not 18.

Step 3: Fill up your water bottle at the little fountain.

Step 4: Do a warm up. Walk on the treadmill, or convince yourself you can run a mile even though you have the lungs of an asthmatic sixth-grader.

Step 5: spot the little twerp in the distance. This is when you’ll feel your heart start to sink a little, which is an odd feeling given the pre-workout is now causing you to believe that you’re hot shit on the treadmill. You probably look like a drowned rat.

Step 6: pretend you’re blind. For me, that’s not hard because I refuse to wear my glasses and my optometrist refuses to prescribe me contacts (we’re at an impasse here).

Step 7: it’s time to get off the treadmill and go to the weights but le twerp is in the section you need to use. Here, either keep pretending you’re blind and just stroll straight up to the weights, or find the hottest man at the gym and use something next to him. (Both are scary).

Step 8: at this point, you’ve successfully avoided le twerp by a combination of pretending to be blind and using two enormous dumbells instead of the barbell you’ve really needed.

Step 9: cool down and stretch. This is where it gets hairy. You can’t see le twerp, and you assume he has ~left the building~. You stroll with the enormous confidence of the pre-workout adderall high into the yoga room to stretch. AND THERE HE IS. THE ONLY OTHER FUCKING PERSON IN THIS GODDAMN ROOM.

Step 10: keep pretending you’re blind. Except you can’t, because he knows you’ve seen him. He waves. Your brain cell is telling you to use the nearest emergency exit because that pit in your stomach is starting to become an issue. You give him the smallest grimace known to man, the tiniest acknowledgement you can bear.

Step 11: ASS UP IN THE AIR. TOUCH YOUR TOES. DO A SPLIT.

Step 12: you wait until he has left and suddenly all the adrenaline leaves your body and the pit in your stomach swells until it seems almost all-encompassing. You walk out to your car in the parking lot and hold it in until you put your seat belt on. This is where you cry.

Step 13: put on Landslide by the Chicks. It will make things worse. I’m not an advocate of driving while actually blind, so attempt to finish crying in the parking lot (for the time being).

Step 14: drive home. Park. Put on Fields of Gold by Eva Cassidy. Cry a lot more. You will eventually feel like you have nothing left inside of you.

Step 15: get yourself together because you have 298 Anki cards on the autonomic nervous system to finish. It will be ok. Tell yourself this, even though you don’t believe it.

I think it’s hard to encapsulate both the simultaneous feeling of enormous possibility and the deep loneliness that you find in your mid-twenties. It’s hard to pick yourself up every morning knowing that you used to have someone to share your day with but that they’re a stranger now. I guess some people are just meant to be lessons, but compared to being taught the physiology of the heart, learning how to really heal it is proving to be the toughest lecture yet.

I woke up at 4:30 am the morning I started medical school. The one brain cell I had somehow retained in the three years since graduating college was really going wild at the thought of a highly anticipated “first day of school.” It felt like I was about to jump off a cliff, because despite years of preparation, I really had no idea what I had gotten myself into.

After a fresh breakup and a month of seeing a therapist, I was feeling hopeful but also like I was going to shat myself. So there I was, at 4:30 am, looking at the syllabus for my classes. And all I could think was, “shit, I’m going to have to re-learn the Kreb’s cycle again.”

I think I blacked out the whole week of orientation. Truly. I have never been that bone-tired in my life (except for maybe the mono days of undergrad). Highlights of that week include meeting some cool new friends, running around campus like it was 2019, and going on a date with a guy I made out with in a bar the weekend before. Overall, a solid week.

What I was wholly unprepared for was the absolute onslaught of material they threw at us on the first day. By the third day, I was dissecting in the gross anatomy lab, with the echoes of “did that girl just run to the bathroom??” still swirling in my brain. Turns out, even after throwing up in the PhD student bathroom, the lingering formaldehyde will lead you to eating the largest dinner you’ve ever seen.

Two weeks later, I had somehow made it through to my first exam. Here’s where it gets a little rough. I hadn’t been to the gym in three weeks, I hadn’t gone grocery shopping once, and I had barely showered. Glamorous, I know (those med students on TikTok are lying to you about how fun it is out here). I felt like a wreck, and every time I tried to do something that wasn’t related to studying, it felt like I was wasting time that I could be cramming things into my brain. Genetics, sickle cell, HIV, glucose catabolism, testing sensitivities, anatomy of the back…it all felt like it was just too much. What if I failed? I had totally made a mistake…I didn’t belong here. Why did they let me in? I felt like a total fraud.

“Would the world really end if you failed your exam?” I had to think about that one for a minute when my therapist so cutely inquired as to my deepest, darkest fear. Yeah, honestly it felt like it would. But would it really? YES. At least that’s what my brain cell was telling me. To have worked so hard towards something and fail on such an epic proportion would be such a catastrophic event, that I couldn’t even fathom what the fallout would look like. I had no other fallback.

So I took the exam. And you know what? I passed. And I scored above the average. And I’m not saying that in your typical type A medical student stereotype. I’m saying that because it really changed my outlook on deserving to be here. I made it through and my brain cell now actually believes that I can possibly make it through this in one piece.

Hopefully four years from now I’ll read this and laugh at how dramatic I was being. TTYL.

Yikes. I should’ve done this a long time ago. To catch you up (I’m imagining I have an audience here), this winter I tragically ran into a guy I was dating/not dating/you know the deal-ing the previous winter. To say that he broke my heart into a million little pieces would probably be accurate (and that bitch did it a week before I re-took the MCAT), and after he did so, I never spoke to him again. So 10 months later, cue me running into him at the top of a ski lift on a random Friday that I had called out of work for because there was a blizzard. The next weekend, I also ran into him again at a ski resort, where I tragically had my car key eject itself from my unzipped pocket, and I had to call him and ask him for a ride home. He then gave me a lift back to the mountain the next day and after that, we stayed in touch more than I was expecting.

I’m not really one to believe in coincidences being anything more than just that, but after 10 months of no contact and not a single run-in in a small city, twice in one week was something I couldn’t shake thinking about. Fast forward through a month and a half of planned meet-ups at concerts and bars, there was one late night at my house where he told me that he wanted to date me for real this time. He told me that he had messed up last time and wanted to take a chance with me for real now. Like excuse me, is this not music to my ears? I wanted to see so bad the potential of everything I thought it could be last time, but I knew this time would be so much better, because he showed me how he had changed.

If I could go back to that moment right now, I would likely slap the shit out of myself. What an idiot. Obviously hopefully you can tell that it didn’t end up working out. Two weeks into us dating, I got into medical school; this was something I had been working towards since I left the womb (well, not really, but it felt like it), and everything seemed like it was falling into place for me. Historically, nothing has really ever gone my way (shout out to getting the exact same score on my MCAT retake as the first time), so it felt so damn good to finally have two things that I had really been longing for.

But as time went on, it started to become clear to me that it didn’t entirely feel like we were dating. I felt excluded from his plans and ultimately, really left out of his life. It started to feel like the first time around, and I knew I had to say something. So, after having a whole two weeks to think about how to phrase my VERY BASIC need for more effort while I was on a solo trip, I initiated the discussion two days after I got back from my trip. That night, we broke up. On the three month mark, to the day.

Our conversation quickly shifted from expressing my needs, to his concern about me going to school, and how I would find the time to settle down when I was going to be so busy with a demanding career. BRO. You’re concerned about the theoretical time I might not have to spend with you when you can barely take any time to spend with me right now?? Yeah, anyway.

The next day I’m frantically scrolling through PsychologyToday’s website in search of a therapist while taking breaks to uncontrollably sob into my pillow. Did he break up with me solely because of my career choice? Or was that just some bullshit excuse for some other reason that had to do with me? My mind was ~unwell~ and spiraling; to be rejected not once, but twice, by the same man, whose idea it was in the first place that we date. Rage. Straight to hell.

Meanwhile, I was able to convince my parents to pay for therapy (“yeah so because neither of you went to therapy, that’s the reason I have to go, and now you have to pay for it thanks”). This shit is hard, and I should’ve gone a long time ago. I’ve had a lot of big transitions in my life, and I’m coming up on the biggest one yet, in the midst of my first-ever break up. In the last few weeks, I’ve doubted my decision to go to medical school for the first time: will I be smart enough? Will I be able to have a family? Do I even want to have a family? Will any guy put up with my schedule?

After writing all this, I don’t really know where this post is going, other than it felt really good to just get it all out there. Hopefully I’m not alone in feeling these sorts of things. As I say to my friends, I’ll make sure to keep you ~super updated~.

Basically, I’m too poor to find a therapist, so I started journaling. And then my hand cramped up…turns out that my days hand-writing in cursive using a fountain pen at a Waldorf school didn’t prepare me for documenting the perils of my mid-twenties.

I’m not going to pretend that my stories are unique, or fabulous, or motivating. I’d go with comedically traumatic, for a start. It usually doesn’t take long for people I meet to figure out that the universe has it out for me in some sort of sick, twisted way. One of my old coworkers recently asked me “do you ever feel like god just made your entire existence as a joke?” And that really just sums up my whole experience on this rock.

Welcome to the shitshow of a single girl in her mid-twenties, trying to navigate the world of working in healthcare, paying her taxes, eating enough protein, avoiding an ex at the gym, and generally trying to survive.