Rip Current

Julia ma

MD Class of 2025

It was a chance meeting — we discovered that we both went to the same university, graduated a year apart, and yet, she was graduating from her residency program, and I had just started my first year at medical school. Both almost 30. Different stage of life.

They say that when you encounter a rip current at the beach, you shouldn’t swim against it. Instead, you can either stay in place and let it carry you out until it fades or swim parallel to the shore until you escape it. In essence, moving sideways. It’s difficult to keep your head afloat among relentless waves, but sometimes, all you can do is let the wave fall over you and float back up to breathe.

It was a quiet morning, shattered by a phone call with my sister’s voice, “Daddy’s unconscious. They’re doing CPR and stuff on him, but he’s not responding. They’re taking him to the hospital.” My mind was in weary shock, comprehending, yet not comprehending, wondering why because there was no apparent reason.

Two hours later, I received another phone call. There was a funeral and a graduation the next week.

In a job interview, a manager asked me, “Why didn’t you study further?” I eventually decided on the words, “Family issues.” Perhaps staying in a laboratory job for 6 years indicated I was not very proactive, but I didn’t know how to tell him that the job wasn’t originally for my career development. It was for survival. For holding onto the house my father left behind for us. It was the first thing that came along, and I just went for it in my blind grief. I’m sure my mother had unfortunately received many well-intended comments about how her two daughters should be heading out and living their best lives — how

she should sell the house and get on with her life. The fact was we were barely holding the four walls together, let alone thinking of our next steps in life.

In my father’s eulogy, I mentioned trying to find some gift he had given me as a memento I could carry with me, but I realized that everything in my room was a gift from him. He was the father who gave up his comfortable job back in his home country to come to a foreign land and take up a job that worked him to his bone because he wanted his children to be educated here. He moved sideways so we could move forward.

It was easy as a young adult to think that I sacrificed my last seven years of life because of an event that derailed all that I had envisioned it to be. After all, I had watched my friends move on, get engaged, get married, travel, get promoted — it’s easy to feel invisible and let it fester into bitterness. But maybe it wasn’t sacrifice. Maybe it’s like the way a baby bird falls from the nest to catch the wind on its first flight — an act of surrender. Surrendering this time so that my sister could graduate. So that my mom had someone beside her. Surrendering this time as my father did for us, and like many others who have taken pauses in their lives to help us.

I am often reminded of a letter I wrote to someone who had lost her father in an accident. Perhaps when I wrote the letter, I was also writing to myself — to myself 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years. Live with the sorrow and the pain. Live with it and let not your heart be hardened. It is in living with pain that we know how to carry it and thus help others carry theirs. It is in living with this sorrow that we understand this verse: “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have in plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all things through Him who gives me strength.” It is in living with pain that we become stronger, more humble, and more compassionate because this is our road.