Serotonin

"If you're happy and you know it clap your hands..."

As bitty-bye kinderkids, we learn our lefts and our rights, our rights and our wrongs. We learn to share, we learn to care. We learn to stand up and to sit down, to speak up and to speak out, to zip, buckle, and bow. We learn to dot, we learn to cross, and to stay inside the lines. Simon says this and simon says that and we eat it up with our paste and crayons.

As young adults with our growing pains and acne, we learn ego and we learn id. We learn judgment, we learn rejection. We learn to question. We learn to challenge. And we start to change.

As masochistic medical students we learn our limits. Fifty two lectures on a quiz, thirty six hours on a shift, and twenty four usable hours in a day. We learn to count down, we learn to cross fingers, we learn to never give up ever ever ever. But we're never taught how to be happy. We're never taught how to live with life. We're never taught keeping in touch and how to sleep in. We're never taught how to relax. We're never taught what defines friendship. These are things we find, things we pick up, things we cope with.

Slowly I've given up my destracting, destructive vices, one by one, and I'm now left with this gaping void, this vulnerability, just skin deep. I feel a fragility in my breath and slowly am coming to realize that I'm finally catching up with myself. It's like the blood has finally rushed back into my body, as if I've been dead for these past 25 years. It's a peculiar thing to describe. I've been lost for so long, and now that I am finally exactly where I mean to be, I can finally take the world off my shoulders, put down my bags, and call this home.

Time to time when I'm driving home from school the waves crest and crash and it sucks the air right out of my mouth. I cry. I cry like a little baby. And I have no shame about it. Because I made it, despite it all, I made it. It's overwhelming, this gift. And it's becoming harder to forget how lucky I am to be here.

This is home.

This is me.

This is mine, my one and only.