Twenty Minutes of Eternity by Walter

Twenty Minutes of Eternity by Walter - August 2014 Scholarship Essay

I ripped open the envelope, taking ten seconds to scan the message inside for news long desired. My heart sunk.

Returning to my apartment in a haze of disappointment, I plopped onto my bed, feeling like I had just been gutted. I croaked the news to mom, and she listened, offering her comforting words that sounded insensitively taunting to my hollowed mind. Not getting accepted to medical school the first time around took me a while to accept. And by "a while," I mean about twenty minutes. Slouched on the bed, I tried for five of those twenty minutes to make sense of the letter, reading and rereading it, thoughts swarming, "What did I do wrong? I thought the interview went well. I probably should have..." For the next fifteen minutes, a self-deprecating wallow followed my introspection, and I became worthy of nothing good. I used that fourth of an hour to stomp on my own ego and crush my confidence, becoming a broken shadow of the man who walked to the mailbox only minutes before. Said this fool of his folly, "You didn't deserve to get in."

The subsequent minutes seemed to tick by with speed comparable to a snail gliding through molasses: time dilation exemplified within my own defeated psyche, like the stretching of time accompanying a gravitational singularity. In my funk, the center point of densest depression kept inching just a bit beyond my reach, stringing my spinning thoughts through perceived failure after failure. I characterize those first twenty minutes as a sluggish period purposed only for the dispensation of bitter memories. Accordingly, my self-loathing steadily intensified. The minutes then insulted me with a tragically detailed recollection of the past four years; I suppose that blame for my great defeat required subconscious attribution. Freshman year's themes of stark financial decline and familial upheaval smacked me roughly during my emotional swirl. Sophomore year's equally complex stories delivered their punch next: a lengthy bout with idiopathic gastroparesis that went undiagnosed for months, my triumphal academic recovery in Fall 2011, and my relapse into depression in Spring 2012 that once again choked my resolve. Junior year wrought massive changes in my mentality, an awakening into adulthood from an immature snooze: I stumbled along the bumpy road of a misguided romance, unequipped to deal with its paralyzing effects. Senior year, which I have only just exited, took shape during my spiraling remembrance as a period I spent recovering from the past three years, and only finally learning how to cope with a billion simultaneous stresses.

Four years wrapped into twenty attritional minutes.

Lucky for me, my comparison between emotions and physics is limited, because the Schwarzschild radius around an emotional singularity is escapable. But I needed those twenty minutes: they prodded me to construct the mental framework I own now. My personality demands that I metacognitively determine what truths I might glean from life experiences and how these truths illustrate some random grander scheme. So I sat on that bed and sank into an exhausted depression for twenty minutes. However, I never reached the singularity since that requires an eternity. I have only a year before the medical school class of 2015 begins, so extrication from the depression was paramount. Hence a turning point! In the seconds following my epiphany, I experienced a swelling of excited fortitude, the strength of which I had never previously encountered. "You have to apply again." Peering through a hole in my wall of self-doubt and into my 2015, I pictured a first-year student of medicine. "Yes, that's who I will be," I purposed triumphantly. I hardly consider this a premature triumph, because in those first moments of excitement, I imagined myself as already victorious. Steely determination arrived, along with a resoluteness flexible in deciding the means to reach my goal, but with an iron strength to support it. Pliable but unbreakable. Medicine remains my goal, and my resolve has never been stronger.

To a degree, that crushing letter transformed me, being the final disappointment I required to shove me into the realm of absolute self-determination. Clarity of desire and purpose dethroned the doubts that previously reigned within this mind ravaged by uncertainty. I desire to join my fascination with medicine to my ability to serve my fellow man, to purposely forge a medical doctor who loves all aspects of the practice; a doctor motivated by a heart well acquainted with pain, a heart equipped for empathizing with a patient's struggle. A heart with enough compassion not to be repulsed by the oozing wounds, the stench of necrosis, the midnight consults, the patient malcontent, the despairing families, and the inevitability of death and accompanying self-doubt of the physician. A heart never fully ready to encounter any of these things, but willing to do so. On only my second volunteer day at St. Joseph Hospice, the nurse who served as my mentor expressed a sentiment toward a woman overflowing with gratitude for our visitation. His words declare the fundamental truth of the medical profession, and I accept them as my mission: "We are just servants."

Four words to describe the rest of my lifework.