2025
twelve bits of grace & memory
Hi all,
I decided to bring my substack back after archiving most everything and relearning that writing is sometimes worth sharing…
2025 has been my favorite year. I keep returning to the word overtaken. Like how you feel when a plane flies over your head. In gratitude, I wanted to write a commemoration of what has overtaken us this year, and affirm that life can just be good.
I’m sharing twelve bits: eight chronological memories, and four best-of things from the year.
Thank you for making this time so special. If you have something you feel compelled to share, I’d love to be its witness.
Homily (1) - January
My year started with a homily and the eyes of a priest that broke my heart open. His words set the cadence for my year.
Fr. Pat Earl preaching at Holy Trinity in D.C. –
“And the Rabbi said to his students: how do you know that the night has become the day?
And one said, when you look into the horizon and know the animal there is a sheep, and not a goat.
But the Rabbi said, ‘No’.
And the other said, when you see a tree in the field, and know it is a fig tree or a sycamore.
And again, the Rabbi said, ‘No.’
My brothers and sisters, you know the night has become the day when you look into your brother’s face and see the face of God.”
Five minutes after Mass ended, I turned away from my companion to touch Fr. Earl’s arm and said, “Father, your homily was incredible.” He grabbed my hands, thanked me, and I saw straight into his crystalline eyes, lucent against turgid skin.
Our embrace in that very moment was the definition of pastoral care. His homily became real in that interaction, in our sharing of bright eyes.
Milestone (2) - March
I took Step 1, my first medical board exam, on February 24. The week leading up to Step 1, I picked the skin off my thumbnails until they bled. I shared this anxiety with the rest of my class and especially my two wonderful roommates, who also took the exam that week.
The day after Step, I went to Walmart with Truc, one of my best friends, to regulate our nervous systems. She bought Takis and gave them to our favorite priest. I bought a tank-top and greek yogurt. Sitting in the passenger seat of her RAV4, I felt like our friendship was a miracle, an act of divinity putting ourselves back together again.
I also felt this at home, where studying and passing this exam, together, was an act of sisterhood. It was a testament to love that shows up in silence, in snowfall, in suffering. We screamed and cried and put each other back together again. I couldn’t have done it without Neha & Keerthana creating a shelter even when we felt like we didn’t have anything to give. I am so grateful to be under their care.
Season (3) - May
Taurus Season started as I rotated on Labor & Delivery during my first clinical rotation. I told myself that assisting with the births of these children was God’s way of healing my long-standing interpersonal issues with Tauruses.
On L&D, I lost count of the number of placentas I helped deliver. I got better at calibrating what the role of a fairly incompetent medical student might be in these women’s birth plans. In an emergency C-section, the scrub nurse instructed me to take pictures. She handed me the patient’s phone and I documented the first moments of her son entering the world. I recorded the first time her mother held him, and zoomed in on her perfectly healthy first-born resting on her chest.
It is a supernatural privilege to attend to life in the delivery room. Even as a medical student, you become a subject in one of the most liminal spaces of a person’s life. You are entrusted as a witness to divine co-creation, meeting a soul that once lived outside of time and has now been granted entrance into the world. Light coming to know light.
Virtue (4) - June (and always)
My spiritual director tells me that mercy is “the willingness to enter into the chaos of the other.”
He says this after I tell him about rotating on Child Psychiatry. My first patient on the service was a 17 year-old girl admitted to the inpatient adolescent unit for suicidal ideation. She was listless, avoiding eye contact, and hesitant to explain her feelings of being misunderstood, isolated, and uncertain about her future.
In our listening, the story of her present depression slowly unfolded. We continued to listen. Somewhere in the silence between her sputtering, I realized she wasn’t sitting in front of us seeking a pharmacologic cure for her plight. Maybe she didn’t want a cure at all. She was looking for accompaniment. Someone who would weather her storm, and hold steady as she shared the intricacies of her emotional labor.
Being with the kids on the psych unit taught me that belief is sometimes our most powerful medicine. Belief is the first act of healing. And hand-in-hand with belief, comes mercy.
Mercy – the willingness to enter into the chaos of the other.
Place (5), Nottely Lake, Georgia - July
For our two-week summer break, I flew to Atlanta to see my very first college friend, a friend I met walking out of an elevator on the first day of orientation. Eight years later, Ben and I still have scheduled Sunday calls. He extends grace with accountability like no one else; he is a Sagittarius sun and Virgo moon. I love him for the ways he has taught me to be brave.
We stayed at Ben’s family lakehouse to bear witness to the trees that have held ground for centuries and loved him since his birth. Despite my stubborn hesitation, Ben urged me to jump into the lake, just to try it, just once. But I was scared to death – I honestly didn’t know if I couldn’t swim, or if this was a lie I kept up to avoid occasions that involved swimming.
Ben is the kind of friend that could convince a fish to walk. Loved by his patient persistence, I eventually jumped. And flailed, and screamed, and lived.
But I couldn’t really keep my head above water, so I waded back to the deck and said thank you. Thank you for being the friend that knows me well enough to challenge the lies I tell myself. Thank you for being here, in the middle of Georgia, even after all this time. Thank you for bringing me back to shore.
Concert (6) - September
On September 21, my little brother turned 13, and I saw Hand Habits play at the 9:30 Club in D.C.
Hand Habits is one of my top-three most formative bands. When I last saw them in Austin in 2019, I was with my college boyfriend, experiencing for the first time what it feels like to be held in the presence of live music. Something about this changes a person.
Not long afterwards, we broke up, and I’d spin Hand Habits during my college radio show and cry in the DJ booth. Mostly for the dramatics.
Seeing Hand Habits again, seven years later, swaying and humming alone, felt like a tender homage to my 19 year-old self.
After the concert, I was sweetly driven home. I thought about that past self again, knowing she would be delighted and profoundly comforted by the love that would soon come.
Wedding (7) - November
On November 1, All Saints’ Day, two of the most wonderful and ineffable humans in the world married each other at Dahlgren Chapel at Georgetown. My friends up on that altar, love vowing itself to love, brought heaven down to us.
It was all very sacred and any description falls short of the mysticism of what transpired.
Without a doubt one of the most beautiful things I’ve experienced this year or ever.
Brendan and Veronica…I love y’all
Decision (8) - December
As the third year of medical school comes to a close, we are asked to begin planning for residency. This month, I made my officially unofficial decision to pursue Psychiatry.
It is a beautiful thing to be led. Sitting with teens on Child Psychiatry, then drawing close to every sort of waywardness on my general Psych rotation, I knew I was being called – called to stay, then called to accompany the other through the highest and lowest arches of human experience.
I came into medical school thinking I would train to take care of dying people and assume the most traditional path to that end. This is still my goal, but it’s true, we make plans and God laughs. We are laughing together.
~
uncategorized things from this year’s great surprises:
Advice (9)
Anonymously,
“Don’t quit before the miracle happens.”
Book (10)
The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath - Leslie Jamison
A mix of autobiography and ethnography, Jamison shares her experience with alcoholism within the social and political history of addiction in the U.S.
Her suffering is not unique – it testifies to the cyclic and unoriginal afflictions of all addicts. I highly recommend her book to anyone interested in this world and its day-to-day realities.
Podcast (11)
Parenting through the Storm – Back from the Abyss: Psychiatry in Stories
This podcast episode is led by a father of two boys adopted from a mother afflicted by intra- and post-partum drug addiction. It is a story that holds incredible, life-threatening fear alongside unconditional love. It is the essence of what it means to parent, and deepened by the complexities of adoption, irreparable trauma, and supernatural hope. Regardless of your interest in mental health or medicine, it is a story that I believe would turn the heart of any listener.
Song (12)
Being in Love - Songs: Ohia, Jason Molina
This is a perfect song. It holds you in the heart of the matter and rocks you back and forth.
“Being in love means you are completely broken, then put back together. The one piece that was yours is beating in your lover’s breast; she says the same thing about hers. However it is I have gotten here, I have plans to be with you. And for the first time, it is working. It is working.”
It is my song of the year.
Life happens and life can just be good. I hope something miraculous happens for you this year. Thanks for reading.
Blessings,
A
