Landslide

I'll be the first to admit that I am terrible with change. For someone who has moved so many times in my childhood, and lived through countless experiences of being the new kid at school, I am disappointed to report that I have not yet figured out the secret to making change not terrible. Maybe terrible isn't the right word. I guess my relationship with change should be described as complicated. I simultaneously yearn for it and yet find myself easily overwhelmed when it arrives. Every new apartment I've moved into, I would plan for it weeks in advance, scour the nearby streets with google maps, and pick out my new favourite coffee shops ahead of time. And when moving day finally came and ended, and furniture was assembled and everything unloaded, I would inevitably find myself leaning out my 8th floor balcony, watching my ant sized family members in the parking lot drive away, and I would eventually sit amidst the empty boxes and have a good cry. This happens every time. And then, within weeks, as if right on schedule, that feeling would lay forgotten, and the new apartment would be home.

I guess that is my one redeeming trait. That left with no options, I always manage to find some semblance of home in places I settle. It is perhaps for this very reason that I have so much trouble answering the question: where is home for you? To an acquaintance, I would answer this practically, and say that home is last place I lived in. But home, for me is scattered in multiple cities, with multiple people, who have all felt like a version of home in that very moment, neither one superior to the other, neither one more of a home.

For instance. China is home. It is where I was born, it is where I spoke my first words, took my first steps, it is where the family who have come before me lived. I have always been comforted by the idea that somewhere out there, long ago there was someone who had my exact same eyes, and who could show off her ear wiggling skills to her friends who could not do it no matter how hard they tried. There is an unconventional beauty in the science of genetics, in the same way that find we comfort in belonging to a past. It is the very immutability of their nature which allows us to find a sense of home within it.

Quebec is also home. It was my first glimpse of Canada. I still have a foggy mental projection of the airport that night, my mom's dormitory and the taste of peach yoghurt, and snow, tons and tons of it. I remember being five years old and in daycare one day, when I said to my teacher: In the summer I miss winter, and in the winter I miss summer. She burst into laughter and told me I was becoming a real Québecoise. That stayed with me, both in my inability to be satisfied by the current season and always longing for the next, as well as that little part of me that still considers myself nothing less than a real Québecoise.

Home is Ontario, and all it's basement apartments, then real apartments, then finally houses that we have lived in and called home. It is my present, it's where my parents live, my best friends live (except one, don't worry, Sarah you get your own paragraph later), where I learned how to be a doctor, and it's where I am at this very moment, having sat down to write just an hour ago, because I found myself feeling lonely and missing home. The irony is not lost on me.

You have to understand that with these blog entries. I never know where it is going to go. It is the very reason I choose to write in the first place, to find direction. A little spoiler, I only write when I feel inspired, which often means very very happy or very very sad. In the spaces in between when I don't write, I am either very very fine, or very very busy. I write to process how I am feeling, this is me thinking out loud, with no map or blueprint. And so you'll forgive me if a little unplanned irony and hypocrisy pops out here and there. Now back to my original point.

My point being, as I write, I am realizing how fortunate I am to feel at home in many places. I didn't realize this until I listed all these places out loud. Just writing this out, I realize what a difference wording makes. To feel at home vs to be at home. I have taken this for granted, the ability to feel at home when you are at home.

I am writing this at home. In my new home that does not feel like a home. Up North. Come to think of it, of all the directions, North would probably my least favourite. North is synonymous for cold, North is snow, North is isolation. It is hard to derive home from the word North. And yet, here I am for the next two months doing rural medicine. The people are nice enough, actually no, more than that, they're very nice. And yet, there is just enough of something that is missing to prompt me to sit down tonight and write as a way to fill the space of this unknown absence.

Let's not kid ourselves. I know myself, I know what that something missing is. People. Familiar people. I have never been this far away from all the people I have ever known. When I moved into my first apartment with Angela, after my parents left, she hugged me and let me, all snotty-nosed, cry into her very nice jacket. That was the moment I knew she was going to be one of my best friends (You need to understand, Angela owns very nice expensive jackets.) And even in my last apartment, how could I cry for long, when Cheddar the cat would come strutting into my apartment unannounced, as if saying, you're not actually alone, technically I own this place too. And here I am now. Just me. And even for me, this is new. Even in Lyon, I had labmates and people who came from Canada through the same program, new to the country just like I was. And it's different now, I'm not on vacation. On top of studying for my exams, I'm expected to be a real doctor here, more so than I have ever been, with new responsibilities that I have never undertaken before. It terrifies me, that's always been a fear I've never been able to shake off with medicine, what if I accidentally hurt someone in the process.

But I'm learning to cope with it. It's been a week here and I'm much better this Sunday than I was the last. Although this week, I will be covering the hospital overnight, and this makes me very nervous. Writing for this last hour has helped distract me though. I feel slightly more motivated, and reassured that everything will be fine. Because through everything I have lived through (which is not that much at the ripe age of 25) everything has turned out fine. I'm here now aren't I? This logic is infallible, and in times when emotions threaten to override good sense, logic always works to settle me back down.

Also singing, singing works. I brought my mini-guitar and I sang tonight. It's a song I've actually sung before. I sang it in the summer when my best friend Sarah was moving to Vancouver. We spent the weekend hanging out, trying peruvian food and watching black and white movies and reading, basically doing nothing at all. Finally, the weekend was over and she was going to leave for Vancouver indefinitely, and we had said our goodbyes, and I drove home in silence, feeling a deep, gnawing kind of sadness at the pit of my stomach, the kind that you can only get when your best friend of 12 years leaves with no plans of when she would be back. And so that night, I sat in my bathtub and sang Landslide by Fleetwood Mac. The lyrics made sense in that moment, the whole bit about seeing my reflection in the snow covered hills, and me being the melodramatic person I am, played out a movie scene in which Sarah, rockclimbing in Squamish turns around and sees my face, a giant version of it, plastered on a nearby mountain, Mount Rushmore style. I don't know what exactly cured me that night, the catharsis of singing about change and growing up, or the sheer absurdity of my face carved in stone, and Sarah turning around and thinking: WTF?

I sang it again tonight. Much less sad than last time and me much more okay, so that I didn't need to picture anyone's face in any mountain this time. I feel quite at peace now, and I'm sure the writing also helped.

Speaking of singing, the other night, I was watching TV because they have cable TV here. American Idol was on, which I've never actually seen before. Lionel Richie is on it, and there's this moment when he tells this young girl who was rejected: "Life begins at the end of your comfort zone". That stuck with me, it was only my second day here, and in that moment, those words felt like they were spoken to me directly. I've never listened to Lionel Richie's music much before, but perhaps it's a good time to start.

Maybe I'll just call it a night, not think about work anymore and just read a book and go to bed early. I'm going to be just fine. I will learn lots, I will meet new friends, and find new favourite coffee shops, as I always do and as I always have done. This will just be another experience that I look back on when I find myself needing to convince myself that there is nothing I cannot overcome. And at the end of these two months, I will get to fly to Vancouver and visit Sarah, and see whether my face is actually carved in those snow covered hills; with no landslide in sight to bring me down.