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How I Ruined My Life

And what shame taught me about writing and work.

Xi Chen
Physician Writer
7 min readAug 25, 2021

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Photo by Poppy Thomas Hill from Pexels.

As a medical student, I frequently told a lie that I had wanted to pursue medicine after being inspired by the written works of Dr. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist.

The truth was that reading Dr. Sacks made me want to be a writer, not a doctor.

The lie went like this. As a high school student, I volunteered for the Tourette Syndrome Foundation. There was no particular reason for this, although I claimed a prior interest in neurology. No one in my life had Tourette’s, although that changed through my time with the Foundation.

I befriended a man with Tourette Syndrome who shared my love of making music. The man’s mother, who happened to be the regional organizer of the Foundation, misinterpreted my relationship with her son as a scientific fascination with his condition. To an extent, I did find the man’s tics cool but less for their physiological underpinnings and more for how he channeled those tics into beats.

This is how I ended up with a borrowed copy of Dr. Sacks’ masterpiece, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, a collection of philosophical case studies on patients with various neurological disorders. This book wound up in countless numbers of my essays and interviews for medical school, and as a result, I had read it…

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Physician Writer
Physician Writer

Published in Physician Writer

The Medical Humanities works to recognize the body as a lived-in experience. This publication engages the multifaceted nature of health and illness through essays on art, literature, and philosophy. Interested in being a writer? Email Xi Chen at xrc2@cornell.edu.

Xi Chen
Xi Chen

Written by Xi Chen

I write essays about literary fiction.

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