The Toll
When “Slowing Down” Means Studying Medicine, from Spiral: Prologue
Around the age of thirty-four, having lived an extremely dynamic life full of traveling, missions, and studies, I started to feel somehow tired. Actually, at that age, I realized that I was already so full of life, as if I had lived ten lives. So I decided to slow down, which in my hyperactive mind meant… studying medicine.
Yeah, that is what you do with your life when you want to slow down: study medicine. While still somehow keeping my inertia in projects in India and Kenya. And finalizing my doctorate. And lecturing at the university.
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And as the demands were layered onto an already tired system, the days and nights of studying somehow, surprisingly, led to stress-induced heart arrhythmia. Driven by my inherent and urgent perfectionism, I naturally studied rigorously, only to have my regular physical collapse after exams. Or illnesses. Or hypersomnia. The body’s reserves were single-use — spend them, and then break down.
After two years of study, I decided I really needed a break. And now the best-chosen method for relaxation was — a deployment to Iraq.
Inevitably, the psychological costs deepened further. The exhausting year in Iraq, combined with a breakup just on the day of my return, triggered a persistent state of depersonalization alongside an absence of emotions: a late realization of an inability to cry even in heartbreaking pain.
Upon returning to medical studies, the physical symptoms worsened — fatigue, insomnia, worsened cardiac extrasystoles. All of it culminating in the profound frustration of everything slipping out of my hands to the point of collapse into self-pity, a feeling of being completely useless in utter blackness. All the core insecurities were in the spotlight: the instability of my lifestyle, finances, and my entire value system.
The final push to graduate was executed in pure inertia, with a zombie-mind, detached from all emotions and outcomes, as the pressure itself had become paralyzing. At the time of graduation, I felt no accomplishment, just a slight relief, as emerging from those six years of severe isolation in a book bubble was quite disorienting.
