Artists need to practice vulnerability

In medical school, I went through a period where I swore off social media. I wasn’t going to use it, my thought process went. I didn’t want my patients to find me anywhere. In retrospect, was that the best strategy to take? Probably not. Unless you are focused on the business side, which medicine is part business nowadays, it doesn’t really make any sense to not use social media. Yet, medicine is also an art, and part of being an artist is to express vulnerability. Thus, knowing what I know now, I probably would’ve went back and used Instagram or another medium in a way to set an example for my patient in a sort of lead by example kind of way. I think that’s partly why I created this blog.

When I left medicine, the intent was always focused on the vision to pursue architecture. The travel, the networking, the jobs, the doctorate, it was all part of an overarching strategy to develop myself as an artist. I think on many levels, my supervisors knew that because I had applied to UC Berkeley architecture and, in a way, self-sabotaged my application because I knew I wasn’t really ready at that point in time. I just needed the incentive. I also wanted to document everything in an appropriate, legal way, or at least to the best of my abilities, and social media offered a great way to do that. Who knows, maybe the things I jot down can engender some ideas in my old medical school classmates. After all, we were a class, and I know deep down that many of them do care about how I’m doing. They are physicians, after all.

But now that I’ve expressed some vulnerability, perhaps it’s time to work on the business side. One of criticisms I had in college was that I was not a particularly proactive person. I think that may have just been with girls–and the reason is quite obvious at this point if you’ve read any of my older posts. I didn’t want to get too good with girls because I knew I would be more-or-less impelled to make a commitment. Because I am gay, I naturally don’t get nervous around pretty girls in the way that I’ve observed some of my heterosexual friends to get. I wanted them to have first pick because, quite frankly, I wasn’t focusing on love in college. I assumed that everything would just work itself out, which, in retrospect, is a very coddled way of thinking (You can’t expect the world to bow down to you).

In addition, I’ve noticed that during my schooling in the midwest, my thought process was just a bit different from people around me. It was difficult to find a close friend (What is bro?) and I sensed some vexation, for instance, from some of my peers in the sense that I knew myself to be “smart” or “better” or “confident” or “capable” or whatever you want to call it, but that some of them in particular had wanted to establish the opposite. Some of my so-called friends needed to prove that I was nothing, that I was the dumb one and I felt that I was followed, in some respects. There’s really nothing I can do about that. Again, were they acting? That was the sort of the environment I found myself in at the midwest. It was a bit of a deceptive experience, and it may have just been that I am relatively new to this country. Would have joining a fraternity been the answer to that? I don’t know.