If you’re reading this, it’s okay to start over whenever.
Sometimes, I feel like I’m caught in a cycle of rebuilding myself and putting the pieces back together. Right when I’ve finally sorted through that pile of laundry or restocked my fridge and deleted my Grubhub app, and I finally feel on top of things for a few days, something comes up that topples the tower I just built. Sometimes what comes up is just a small thing, like an annoying headache that makes you feel off for a few days. Other times, it’s something way bigger, like a huge loss in your life.
In the summer of 2021, I lost my uncle to Covid. He lived in Colombia, and the course of the illness took him way faster than any of us ever expected. I spent days comforting my dad, crying with him as he processed not being able to travel to his own brother’s funeral due to the pandemic.
I had started the summer relieved to have some time off to reset after my first year of med school, finally having some time to start an exercise routine, dedicate time to my research, and maybe do some dog sitting. When my plans completely changed, I put all of these things on the backburner. Watching a Zoom meeting of the funeral was extremely grim, and I completely lost focus of the research work that I was supposed to be doing for the next several weeks.
I felt that by the time school started, I would get right back into the swing of things and be okay. But, that didn’t go as expected, I hadn’t rebuilt my tower by the time classes started. I was so upset at myself - I had so much time to start off the year well, and yet I was just throwing facts at my brain and trying to see what would stick. On top of the grief I was experiencing, being so hard on myself about not being on top of things made it all worse.
Since then, I’ve spent months learning to give myself some grace. I’ve had a couple of other big tough things happen over the last year, and I’ve found I cannot keep up with the habit of “I’ll get my sh*t together next week.” I slowly started cooking for myself again, and stopped deleting Grubhub just to redownload it every time things got overwhelming. I started just making my own coffee for a few days, which over several months turned into cooking most of my meals for myself.
It didn’t happen in a day, but it happened. Every day is a good day to make a small manageable change, and you don’t have to go all in on “wellness” in one day. For my next change, I’ll start going on walks again and hope that eventually turns into short runs.
If giving yourself grace means putting off your laundry so you can take time to watch TV with your roommate, so be it. If all you can do for yourself today is cook yourself a meal but don’t have the time to exercise, that’s great. These small acts of kindness for yourself go a really long way. You don’t have to rebuild a tower every time just for it to topple again. You can just build a bunch of tiny castles that don’t all fall over every time something bad or unexpected happens.
We sometimes look for deadlines set by other people for when we are allowed to start all over. Why do we defer to extrinsic dates to start taking care of ourselves? Every day is a new chance to restart.
Natalia T., Boston University School of Medicine ‘24
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