HONESTLY BRUTAL

TLDR: I cared way too much about what other people thought of me. I conformed to their views that I lost my authentic voice and my identity. The series of events that happened in my life in the past couple of months has made me to truly think about myself and my perspective on life. Although I am still young, I am writing this because I feel like I have rediscovered my authenticity and because it marks a significant shift in the way I approach life.

Muddy, foggy, cloudy, and noisy would be the words that I would choose to describe my identity crisis that I was going through in the past couple of months. I was extremely confused, pressured, depressed and tired trying to figure out who I wanted to be and who I was. I constantly looked at role-models, athletes, celebrities, and even TV show characters to try being like them. I didn’t know who I was in a sense that I didn’t really understand what it meant when people told me, “just be yourself.” Who the hell am I supposed to be if I didn’t know who I was in the first place?

To organize this thought catalogue in some way, I want to start off with where I was in the past, where I am right now, and where I want to be. I will try to be brutally honest as possible so that despite this you being able to read this, I can still say what I want. But hey, I don’t really pay attention to what others think of me now so I have no problem with it.

I come from an odd Korean family. Asian parents are infamous for being “coaches” not “cheerleaders” like the parents in the Western world, yet my parents have completely adopted the “cheerleader” mentality in their parenting that I did not feel any sense of pressure coming from them. In high school I always did what I wanted, and my parents’ opinions didn’t matter. That abruptly changed when I entered university despite my parents’ parenting style remaining unchanged. They straight up told me that they would be still happy for me if I didn’t become a doctor. Yet somehow, I managed to put all this immense amount of pressure on myself to be successful in life. I can’t pin point why I decided to put that pressure on myself, but I know that I attributed that pressure to be sourcing from my parents, from my peers, and even from my Korean community. I had this weird notion I created in my mind that I had to be the one in my Korean community that goes on to become a doctor. Honestly, who cares? But I fucking cared, and I had to be that guy. What a narcissist asshole I was… my goodness. I constantly told myself that I didn’t care about the good life — nice cars, nice houses, hot wife, etc… because I read online that those are wrong reasons to be a doctor. So I managed to successfully fake it, and tell people that I wanted to just help people. Manipulative. I know. I can now say that a guy like that doesn’t deserve to become a doctor. He doesn’t deserve to take another student’s place whose heart is in the right place.

Things changed for the better (thank God) just in the past couple of months. I can’t believe it took me this long for me to come to this point, but I’m so glad that I realized everything now then to go on living my life faking everything, deriving my happiness from superficial things. At this point, I honestly could be homeless, totally broke, unsuccessful, single, and look like shit, but I could still be happy. I could be happy because I love my identity and my authentic self, the deep essence of what makes me, me. I say that this love is not a narcissistic love for myself, because it’s more of an acceptance of my identity, my shortcomings in the past, and a channel for me to spread that love to others, and to the world. I didn’t appreciate myself in the past because I didn’t like the imperfect me. I didn’t like the fact that I was not in medical school, I didn’t like how I looked so shitty some days, I didn’t like that I wasn’t wearing fashionable clothes, I didn’t like that I wasn’t smart enough, physically fit, cool, and that I didn’t have a girlfriend. I just wasn’t satisfied at how imperfect I was. So a month ago, I started smoking to be “cool”, went to frat parties and made out with random girls and was so rude to them just to be “badass.” I was eating shitty food and was not treating my body well. I attribute all of that to the fact that I wasn’t happy being me and not loving me enough, including my physical body. I pushed boundaries to see where I fit in as I wanted to try new things to become someone else. I think the source of this problem stems from my external expectations being met in highschool. I got good grades, I played on the basketball team, I was the president, and everything that I strived for was handed right to me. I filled my “cup” through those things. I have never failed and I felt confident and unstoppable. This carried over to university until I realized how imperfect I was. There were people who were accomplishing amazing things and I because I was not them, I felt incomplete. This led to dating problems as well as I was seeking someone else to fill my now-half-emptied “cup”.

There were 2 main events that happened that really made me change the way I looked at myself. One was seeing a girl that was way more authentic than me despite being 3 years younger, and the other was reading an article that I came across called “Tamming the mammoth — Stop caring about what others think — Wait but why?” Even though things didn’t work out with this girl, I don’t regret anything because I learned so much about myself and relationships in general. I always pretended to be cool, and not authentic. I looked good on paper, but I was a guy with a lot of problems, I would brag, and keep everything so serious. Overall, I was so consumed in my own insecurities that I just wasn’t ready to date. I was faking everything from what I was saying to what I was posting on social media, being all pretentious. I came out of that experience with a lot of new lessons, and a recognition that I have to really look at myself and revaluate and reinvent myself.

The second event was the article, which was probably the best philosophical personal development writing I have ever read because it didn’t just tell you “be yourself, or stop caring about other people.” It explained exactly why people have this problem of caring too much of what others think and provided detailed descriptions of the perspectives and the suggestions that they were making to fix this internal problem that we have. Coming back to my decision to go into medicine, this article had a picture where a guy was handing over his degree to his mom saying, “look ma, I got into medical school! Here is my degree!” and the mother feeding that to her own mammoth, which is a depiction of her own insecurities. As difficult as it was to laugh at that, it was so brutally true to and applicable to my life that I kind of cringed. I’m not going to go too much into detail about what the article talks about, but it led me to some serious self reflection which then led me to being relaxed and chill about life, being happier than ever, me just being able to love myself.

So where am I at right now?

I am at a place where my ears have now been attuned to my authentic voice and my mammoth has been tamed. I am just so comfortable with who I am right now that I can honestly careless about what I look like in public. We all have our mammoths, but now I feel like I have successfully tammed mine. I started going to the gym and working out not to look more attractive for others, but because I enjoyed keeping my body fit, healthy, and strong, and because I love my physical body. I used to try to be all cool, tough, and badass, now I just don’t give a shit about me trying to be someone else or trying to display a certain qualities or characteristics that the society has set for men to display. I don’t need to be all tough and angry and stern. I’m just gonna be me who is just trying to put more love into the world by loving others. I am going to empower others and stay respectful. I honestly don’t give a shit if I come across as a “nice guy” because being nice shows more integrity and strength than trying to act all tough and strong and not giving fuck about other people, being rude to them. I don’t want to be that kind of a doctor. Whenever I interact with another human being, I’m gonna try my absolute best to lift that person up and not put them down in order to put myself up. If they don’t appreciate my personality, and my authentic self, it’s totally fine, it’s their problem. All I’m trying to do is to just put more love into the world.

At this point, I want to be a doctor because it’s one of many professions where I can put love into the world, and because I can’t imagine having to work or study anything else other than human physiology for the rest of my life. Physiology is difficult as shit, but I love studying it and I get so much intellectual stimulation from it. Additionally, if I could be a neonatologist or a general paediatrician and be surrounded with kids all day, interacting with them, holding their tiny hands and saving their lives, I could eternally be happy. It’s honestly a way for me to better this world, and my interests, talent, and personality just falls perfectly with the profession that I can’t imagine doing anything else. People tell me that I should be in business because you earn money faster and can get that security faster, but I honestly don’t like the profession as much as I like jobs where I can work with babies all the time. Then why not nursing or an elementary teacher? I consider myself extremely driven and I want to be completely responsible over my patient’s health and figure out the best and the most efficient way to get those babies to be healthy. I wouldn’t mind working extra hours and going through sleepless nights looking through countless articles trying to figure out how to save my patients’ lives and squeezing my brain to figure out the scientific and the medical reason behind why my babies are sick. To be honest, if I don’t get into medical school I would try my best to extract all my potential to help kids that are struggling in other areas. It could be kids with health-related problems, social problems, or kids that are being exploited in an unjust way in our society.

A lot of thoughts. I think I laid out a lot of things of what I’m thinking currently on this paper. At the end of the day. I accept my imperfect personality, and the fact that I will forever be changing and reinventing myself. It’s a long journey. Life is just more beautiful when you love yourself, because you can see beauties in life, beautiful people, and because you can love others. As it is written in the bible, the second most greatest command for us humans is to love our neighbours as ourselves. We put a lot of emphasis on the “neighbour” part, but I focused “love yourself” part because only when you are able to love yourself that you can truly love others. My cup is now filled, in fact, overflowing. I feel as though I could spread that love to others around me.

To close, Dr. David Begg, my former anatomy professor, told our class that we should live life by trying to put little more love into this world. I brushed it off when I first heard it, but it’s truly one of the most beautiful advice I’ve ever heard and I will cherish that forever.