Hey all
Merry Christmas! Hope everyone is having a nice holiday. I have been very fortunate in that I got Christmas week off so I came home over the weekend and get to spend a few days at home. Last week was pretty busy though. I had to give grand rounds lecture so I spent most of the week preparing that. I don't think anyone is a fan of public speaking so I just had this horrible feeling of nausea the whole week in anticipation of giving the stupid lecture. Anyway it went well overall and I was just happy to get the dang thing over with. Between staying up late to research and waking up early to round it was one of those crazy weeks that went by quickly.

I've had this blog for just over two years. It's always amazing to reflect on how fast the time flies. I don't know if I've grown so much as a person since I first started this, but I've made some progress. Hopefully as a doctor I've learned a little bit in the past two years. My co-residents and I are always like...did we know anything in med school? Although when I'm an attending I'll probably think the same thing about myself as a resident.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do with my career. You always get asked what you're really gonna do after residency and I've been purposely avoiding the answer. But now my residency is exactly half over and i can't keep putting my head in the sand. I've purposely not mentioned this but my specialty is internal medicine. (three years) I have ideas of what I don't like but that passion that's supposed to grab me just isn't quite there.

I've also been considering staying on to do a chief residency year but again I'm not sure about it. There would be a lot of advantages to doing it and as my friend says you can only be chief once but I'm not terribly excited to spend another year with my salary in the dumps. Surprisingly I've become interested in hem/onc (blood disorders and cancer) over the last few months but I have no aptitude for research so I know that probably wouldn't be the best field to go into although I like the clinical aspects of it.

The point of all that rambling is to say I gotta do some soul-searching. In the meantime, enjoy the holidays everyone and start working on those new years resolutions. Some of my role models below. :)

hi friends
i'm back from vacation. it was only a week, really too short (as all vacations are) but a great trip all the same. the two things i wanted to talk about in particular are 1. my naked yoga experience and 2. coming out to my best friend from medical school.

the nude yoga experience was wonderful. i'm really glad i got to do it. as a physician i'm constantly violating people's personal boundaries so i don't find anything particularly exciting about nudity. it is definitely powerful though to participate in a non-sexual activity naked. it is just so liberating to be free of your clothing. our instructor was just very straightforward and told us to get undressed and that was it. then there we were, a small group of naked individuals ready to do some yoga. while there was a little bit of self-consciousness upon first getting naked, once we started practicing i really just kind of forgot i was naked. i had not done yoga prior to this, but i liked doing the yoga itself and honestly doing it nude just seems like the most perfectly natural thing to do. maybe it seems silly to think that having everyone naked would build closeness but i definitely think it adds something positive for everyone to be themselves, naked and simple. if i lived in that city i'd definitely be a regular. i would highly recommend you check out whether something like it is offered near your home. try it once!

i stayed with one of my best friends and i had decided before i came that i would tell him i'm a big homo. the first night i got there we went to a bar for some drinks and i met his girlfriend. we had some drinks, she had to go home, then we moved on to another bar to meet some other friends from medical school who also work in the city. being nicely lubricated by all the drinks by the time we got back to my friend's place, i knew i had better do it then or lose that opportunity for the rest of the trip. so i told him that i knew that he knew i was a big homo and we had a nice deep conversation about it.

rewinding a little bit, i've known my friend has known i'm gay since about 4th year of medical school. basically a guy i hooked up with had also hooked up with an openly gay guy in our class who happened to be in one of our circle of friends. that classmate had told my friend about me, i had found out my friend knew from the guy i was hooking up with, but i was too indignant my friend would know all this but not mention any of this to me so i didn't feel the need to confront him on the issue. very dramatic i know.

anyway, i finally told him officially on this trip and it went as well as it could have. i actually wish i was a little less drunk -- i get this anterograde amnesia pretty easily when i drink not even too heavily now-- but we had at times an intense conversation that would have been nice to remember all the details. we talked about a lot of different aspects of my being gay, like why i've hidden it for so long and still hide it from the public at large, and what i really want as far as a relationship and all that. one thing that i remember telling him was that i am just afraid of being hated by the people i love.

i am afraid of being hated by the people i love.

i am afraid of being hated by the people i love.

i am afraid of being hated by the people i love.

that hit me the hardest saying it out loud and it brought me to tears to say that. i think it's the concept that has most paralyzed me from being open about myself. blah blah i know all that crap about the people who really care about me won't care about who i sleep with at night but it is just so hard to overcome that fear of being judged. although at this point in my life i don't really care about being judged so much as finding the man i want to be with for the rest of my life, it's still a reason i'm not shouting from the mountain tops that i'm a faggot. but i am so happy that i finally told my friend the biggest glass secret in our friendship and i'm encouraged to go further from this point being honest about who i am with the world.