Emotional Attachment

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I've been thinking of making green tea ice cream for the recent heat wave, but I never realized how freaking expensive matcha powder is...

Anyone want to help me out?? I'll pay you back and more in delicious edibles!!

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There’s no denying it any longer – I am definitely sick. I don’t get sick very often, but I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep lately (as in averaging about 3-4 hours per night, sometimes as little as 1), and I have a tendency to neglect my diet when I eat alone. Whereas for most people, this means overindulging, I usually veer toward the opposite – snacking on such healthy things that before long I find myself mal-nutritioned and undernourished. So when our next door neighbor developed a cough, it seemed inevitable that his attacking virus should find a new home in me. Honestly, I don’t really mind being sick; I’m never so bad off that my lifestyle is really affected by it. The only thing that really gets annoying is that I’m always so tired all the time, I feel like I’m always drowsy and out of sorts, and no matter how much I nap or rest or bum around, that constant fatigue just never goes away.

            One of my dearest friends here in Philly has been seeing a girl, and it was only recently that he admitted that he had started growing really attached to her. Today I found out that she broke it off, and that it wasn’t going to work out between the two of them. It really makes you wonder about this concept, as foreign and impractical as it may seem: emotional attachment. Why do we get so emotionally attached? Why couldn’t we just be programmed like the rest of the animal kingdom to procreate and survive? More specifically, why do some people get more easily attached than others?

           I know, the answer lies in oxytocin levels affecting specific regions of our brains (especially the limbic system, yes), but please, I’ve had enough of Neuro. I meant it as a rhetorical question. But really, why?

            And is it so bad to get emotionally attached? For one thing, it lead you to getting hurt more easily, which is why after one or two heartbreaks we tend to see it as fairly taboo (look at us, being trained like Pavlov’s dog). But you only get what you pay for; if it weren’t for emotional attachment, we would never really know what we could have had if we did put our whole heart into something or someone. A large part of learning and attainment of wisdom is about letting go. Taking the plunge on faith alone.

            That’s something that I have to work on constantly. It feels very secure for me to know what is going on, what is being planned, where I am going. The problem with that is that when the plan goes off-road and haywire, I flip out and go nuts, which means that I become very impractical and unhelpful for the situation (not to mention very irritable and bitchy). As I have come to learn this year, most of the things we worry and occupy ourselves with are really just things that are out of our own control. And if there is nothing we can do about these little details, then why fight them? Why not let them to go, maintain a clear mind, and then deal calmly with them as they come? It’s only when we place idealistic expectations on something that we fall into disappointment and misunderstanding.

            There are a lot of issues that I could allow myself to worry about right now. Like how much I’m going to suffer in the coming 2^nd year of medical school. How I feel like such an irresponsible and ungrateful daughter about 99% of the time. How I’m probably not going to have time to fully invest in a family for a very long time because of the career I chose. How it’s too late to back out of that right now anyway. How high divorce rates are among doctors. Or even how the hell I’m going to fulfill my dream of making into a legit residency program, never mind one in California. Or in a completely different direction, how many faults and weaknesses I find in my morals, how shaky my religious foundations are and how unreliable I am in resisting the many temptations I am faced with in life.

            But I’m not going to worry about all that right now, because if I do, I may just go insane. Or at least cause havoc on my health and let that the stupid virus in my body win more control over me than it already has. I think, for now, I’m going to finish work, and then go home and bake my dear friend from Philly a sinfully delicious alcoholic cake, and then bask in the fact that I have made someone's day maybe just a little bit more bearable...