Tripti Nagar > Recent Status Updates

“Listen to me, Kalki. You can do so much more than just this. You must not get caught up in the romance of rebellion and gamble with your life.”

I did not wish to bring a daughter into this world of men, into a world that would silence her thoughts before she could even speak them. I wondered how many women had felt this same fear, deep in their bones.

Perhaps we were kin, they and I, yearning for something unnameable, a place where we could stretch our wings and belong.

This is such a beautiful evening. But life doesn’t always glitter like this. People don’t always glitter like this, either. It can be hard to realize that. To really be with someone and see all the parts that don't shine and glow, as well as the parts that do. It can be even harder to let the person you love see your own dark shadows.

Obsession wasn’t pretty. It was an ugly, all-consuming thing. The drive to create a world that only held two people, to escape reality, to blot out the rest of life.

I’ve always prided myself on being the best...I had to win. I collected prizes and awards because I saw them as a reflection of my self-worth, and I thought nothing tasted better than victory. Then I met you. And everything else…faded. We’ve been through some dark times, but you were always the brightest part of my life. Even when we broke up... Just knowing you existed somewhere in this world was enough.

I'd never fallen in love before her. Once I did, I did it the way I did everything else. Completely. Totally. Irrevocably.

Because seeing her smile is like watching the sun rise, and being with her is the only time I feel alive.

His body heat was a living, breathing thing, clouding my mind and stealing my focus until my world consisted of nothing except dark eyes, soft wool, and the clean, expensive scent of citrus and wood.

But when I climbed into bed that night and fell into a fitful sleep, my dreams had nothing to do with work and everything to do with dark hair and stolen touches.

She’d touched down in my life like a tornado, gotten my drink wrong during her first shift at Valhalla, and hadn’t left my thoughts since.

I’ve never been ready for the sharing of keys and consolidating a furniture, but it wasn’t until Phillippe that I started thinking Whitney might be right, that may be a part of me was picking the wrong people on purpose.

Will is the lockbox with no key, and the more time I spend with him, the more I want to give him open. Sometimes I see a glimmer of the old will, but he disappears as quickly as he can.

“There is magic too,” I said… I wanted to explain that when I was able to truly be present, there was a sacredness in what we did every day that was intense and intimate and perfect. It was those times, they were so fleeting, but everything about life wrapped up in those moments…love and respect and humanity and science. It was all there. And it was better than anything

That when we feel them, it guts us, and we hate it, so we joke or we drink or we run or we harden. And that it worried me that that was all any of us knew how to do, to joke or drink or run or harden. That I wanted to learn how we could truly be there for everyone’s hurt, but not to have ir transfer onto us like some sort of prickly, dark matter.

…or grief feels terribly selfish and entitled. That we don’t feel sorry for ourselves because we know it’s not our sadness, it sometimes just feels as if we are seeing all the sadness in the world at once, and we just need a second to breathe, but we haven’t built a mechanism to allow us to breathe, or pause, or feel all the feelings.

That trying to do good can sometimes hurt so much that you break inside and you don’t know if you can go on doing good anymore? That we see terrible, awful, bloody things and it hurts? And we don’t feel we have a right to hurt, because we are in the outer circles of the diagram and everyone around us is right in the center of it and it hurts so much more for them. So feeling anything that resembles sadness…

He was our levity and our gravity, lightening our burden while simultaneously firmly anchoring us to the earth and to each other

There was heartbreak and mountains of guilt and the desperate wish for some mechanism, any mechanism, to augment our resilience. As a physician, I understood how perilously close we always were to failing someone. Even when we intended to do no harm, it seemed, we lacked the necessary tools to heal without layering in some added suffering

The intensity of my focus on medicine was such that I felt fortunate to have a learning opportunity, to personally engage with the path of physiology I studied for so long. I knew I was dying, and I was still struck by the science of my decline

The trouble with not having a safe space within medicine is that for those outside medicine, our stories are almost too much to bear. I tried to download my day, in an effort to find solace, but inevitably my sounding board would get caught up in the details of the story. If I found an event was terrible enough that I needed to debrief, it was too awful for anyone to see past the drama to my emotions and needs.

I believed that one I was a doctor again, I could save my patients through sheer force of attention. I promised myself I wouldn’t miss any clues or bypass any opportunity to help them inch toward recovery. I had never considered what it might feel like to try that hard, care that much, and still lose.

It seemed to me a tremendous imbalance, to have spent all those years focused on the acquisition of information without also having cultivated sufficient space for empathy

I began to think the timing of my illness was more appropriate than I could have possibly known. As much as I had always believed my training would be completed by some date that could be anticipated on a calendar, I clearly wasn’t done. I hadn’t seen all that I had needed to see in terms of suffering, identity and illness.

“An inner city hospital with advanced subspecialty services that took care of the sickest of the sick. They wanted to see as much as they could of every type of disease, to soak in the exposure like vacationers in the sun, before launching into practice “

Every solicitation to “just rest” filled me with contempt. I know what would happen if I left the watchtower unattended. I would die. I believed it was entirely up to me to ensure my own safety. In an ICU in a world-renowned hospital with around-the-clock care by highly skilled medical teams, I felt responsible for myself. That is the power of anxiety.

Friendship, for once, had eclipsed the crisis. It was a glimpse into what our lives could have been.

“Are you really suggesting that love can break the Limit?”

“You haven’t lived if you are not trying to forget.”

"She had not known the weight, until she felt the freedom."