They made me sound like a saint.
Which I am not of course. The one too many complaint, the accidentally-heard gossip, the occasional epiphany… puts one feet on the ground.
My juniors from medical school are compiling a series of stories of interviews with “inspiring doctors”. I was penned as if I had haloes glowing from my hair and portrayed as a doctor from whom love and compassion flowed out all the time. So looking at the draft of the interview they had written, I had to ask myself if would allow such an impeccable image of myself to be portrayed or do something about this. I felt a lie was being protrayed, except one which would be welcomed. After all, a modern day Mother Teresa makes for good inspiration. I ended up rewriting a more than just a few sentences, sharing candidly about my brushes with complaints and mistakes I had made.
I realize, just how important it is to be honest with oneself. Without that, we can neither progress, nor reflect and be made richer for it.
After yet another twenty four-hour call and suffering the verbal abuse of a drunk man punched in the eye at 5am in the morning, and being spoken to harshly by a clinic clerk, I began to see how easily it is for us to absorb the ills in the atmosphere. We harbour hurts, and then have an irresistible desire to inflict those hurts onto others.
Just by observing how I’ve grown, I told Cliff the other day, how it startled me to realize how easily cross I become when injustice is done unto me. Something as inconsequential as somebody cutting my queue or rude service triggers off a fiery sense of being wronged and trespassed. Something, somewhere, sometime, I had allowed my environment to seed hurts into my heart. Reflecting on those moments, I confessed I had allowed the many tiny moments of hurt at work to inflict pain and bitterness in my heart. An unfair remark, a rude word, an ungrateful complaint after you feel you have done your best… they all left some quiet footprint with dirt smeared on the seed-bed of my heart. Because of that hurt, I could see how I too, albeit unconsciously, chose to inflict the same hurt on others by being exacting, or proud or curt.
I began to see the vicious cycle.
I learnt, that many times our anger stems from a sense of being wronged. And this terrifying sense of frustration, stems from a sense of self being violated. I distinctly remember being frustrated with unhelpful staff members after having worked continuously for twenty-four hours. That bitterness arose from a sense of having one’s right to rest being violated. Under extreme stress and exhaustion, one’s heart turns hard easily. One feels oppressed and helpless under the system, and then metes out the same exacting demands on others. Oppression breeds oppression. Measure for measure.
After I started to work, I began to see the lives of others in a more compassionate way. For all my frustration about hundred-hour workweeks junior doctors work, I began to intentionally make conversation with the nameless people who make our lives function the way they do- the aunty who is at the coffeeshop before six in the morning brewing coffee and serving a long line of customers, the uncle who is there before dawn frying noodles to sell for breakfast, or the cleaner who is continuously bending her back to empty the bins from clinic to clinic, and then, when all the rooms have been covered, starting all over again. Many of them have nary a day off. The uncle whom I buy fruits from every day and whose curt tone I used to be irked by told me he gets a day off in two weeks. On the days he works, he never sees daylight. Now we chat and make eye contact. He encourages me when I’m on my night call, and I likewise do the same.
I realize, love and compassion breaks the chain of oppression and bitterness.
The clinic clerk with a gruff tone who once brushed roughly against me and whom my colleagues warned me against also had a story. One day, over polite conversation, she shared that she was divorced. Her son, younger than I, had just passed away from cancer. She stays alone. With her blood-red lipstick and almost cocky stature, no one would have guessed. I remember feeling crossed when hierarchy had been overturned and I was being spoken rudely to. But then I began to see how oppression and anger has its roots in itself, and learnt, that the only way to break the cycle, is to exercise love and compassion.
Love and compassion, however, don’t come naturally. They are rooted in grace, in a deep and profound knowing that in spite of how strongly we hold on to and demand our rights, we have none. We have none and thus they cannot be violated. We cannot be violated and so cannot harbor bitterness.
Grace- it is the knowing that as recipients of it, we have, instead the profound responsibility to give it instead of perpetuating the cycle of oppression and violation; Grace- it is the understanding that we all fall short and yet are forgiven and loved; Grace- it is the realization that no one owes us anything because we are privileged.
So I am learning the importance of being honest with oneself, the significance of releasing hurts and the consequence of truly understanding Grace. This bumbling, stumbling journey of mine may sound nothing like perfect, but I hope it encourages someone out there in a real and human way nonetheless.
We aren’t saints, but we can certainly try to be human.
“… For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
and are justified freely by his grace
through the redemption that came by Christ.”
– Romans 3: 23-24