Cameroon letter #1 - tiles in JFK

Dear Ruthanna,

I’m sitting on the tiled floor next to the cell phone charging station in JFK watching a little boy who is standing in line next to his mother, fussing loudly. He’s wearing his red headphones around his neck. At first I thought he was wearing a dog collar. His mom has a really interesting sense of style, and she seemed like the kind of person who would decorate her child with a dog collar. “My name is Chase, please return me to the lady whose outfit looks just like mine…” He’s got a red iPad and shoes to match the headphones. What he really appears to need is some food and a nap.

  

I’ve barely seen you the past few weeks… months… year. Even though we live – lived – together. It’s been a whirlwind. Me studying for the MCAT, taking the MCAT, writing hundreds of essays, catching plane flights to interviews in between weekends at work, finalizing Mercy Ships details, writing and rewriting my QI project manuscript… and in between all these little flashes of random joy. You dancing wildly in the kitchen to “Freaks,” Sarah and I watching the gerbils explore the old slipper we gave them as a winter home, you and Sarah singing Disney songs off-key while Dad comments, tongue-in-cheek, “Harmony.” So many little shooting stars of joy all throughout the dark autumn and winter.

Suddenly everything I’d been working on, waiting for – or everything that had waited for me – for years fell into place. Suddenly I’m choosing a med school offer finalizing my project resigning my job announcing my plans buying tickets to Cameroon ending my fulltime nursing career coming home crying from saying goodbye to all my coworkers packing too much stuff driving to New York sitting on the floor in JFK writing to you. I look away from the computer and the suddenness melts off me slowly. Slowly, surely, this is real. Slowly, surely, I miss you.

I wrote a letter to the boys four years ago, sitting on the tiles in Ataturk Airport, with the emptiness of my world wrapped like lead around me, exhausted and wanting to know what to do next. How to move forward. Where to go. How to keep living. That’s what happens to you when you lose home and are far from family and don’t live out your real passions. I’d been a nurse for two years, started NP school, precepted, gotten active in my church, was spending time with friends and their wonderful children – and I was so hungry, bored, and miserable inside, I couldn’t imagine having a reason to keep living till I was 30.  I suspended my NP program, moved to PA, and tried the last thing on my career goals list – becoming an ICU nurse.

A year later, I decided to finish up my pre-med classes. Then, like the last numbers in the Sudoku game, things started coming together faster than I could keep track of them. My physics professor waived a year of calculus so I could take his classes. Penn State gave me a massive tuition discount. My job scheduled me around all my lab classes so I could still work fulltime. Sitting in physics and biology classes, my brain was satisfied for the first time in years. My job satisfaction mushroomed as I connected the dots between science and healthcare.

A year after that, I scheduled my last class pre-MCAT and applied to MercyShips. A year after that, I got accepted to MercyShips for spring 2018, took the MCAT, and started writing my med school application.

So here we are, four years from my last Africa letters, and I’m sitting on the floor in the airport again, dizzied by the rush of people and voices around me and the whirl of things I care about, things I need to live long beyond 30 for, in my mind.

What changed between the airports? I am still wondering. What changed in me? I think I just got so desperate, I hit a point of no return. I’ve always been a bridges girl – I don’t burn them. I always have a backup option, another plan, an alternative truth, a way to never fully commit. I’ve seen so much failure – disproportionately, probably, because I’m a perfectionist and an exaggerator – that I did everything to avoid belonging entirely to something that could fall short. And med school, becoming a physician, going with a short-term overseas mission, framing my life around the people and things I love most – it kicks out all the backstops, emergency brakes, and second options. You’re committed to this thing, and if it fails, you’re going down with it. That’s love, and I don’t think you love until you get desperate. At least, I didn’t.

One day I woke up and thought, “If living is this hard, I might as well be dead. If I might as well be dead, then why not just go ahead and epically fail? And if I’m going to epically fail, I’d better fail in the name of a love I would sell my soul for.”

So I sold out for everything I’d ever dreamed of loving, everything I could epically fail.

Like one of my new favorite songs from The Greatest Showman, “Never sure, never know how far we could fall, but it’s all an adventure that comes with a breath-taking view.”

It turns out that loving something enough to fail is what gives you reasons to live.  

Who knew?

I love you, Tabi