Eric Tian

The week between Christmas and New Years has always been a favourite. A period where nobody expects anything from you and nothing you do matters much. I call it the cheers week.

In cheers week, I like to look back on the year that’s passed and wrap it up. Here are some of my favourite things from 2023:

Memories: Witnessing my first birth in O+G. Saying hi to my niece June who was born in June. Verifying death on a patient who had just died. Regaining my fitness after an achilles injury five years ago. Getting my short stories published and the imposter syndrome that followed. Taking tennis lessons. Finishing OSCEs. Morning bike rides with no agenda. Encounters with strangers in the rain. Getting a concussion right before exams.

Newsletters: Sahil Bloom’s Curiosity Chronicle for rich ideas. Austin Kleon’s newsletter, author of Show Your Work! – the book that made me start this blog. Rob Walker’s Art of Noticing. Alex & Books’ newsletter for book summaries and practical reading tips. George Mack for short 0.1% ideas. Farnam Street’s Brain Food for interesting articles.

Fiction: Genzaburo Yoshino’s How Do You Live?, a heart-wrenching and uplifting story of a boy finding his way in the world. Claire Keegan’s Foster, a story about the impact strangers can have on our lives, and an inspiration for my published short story Nurture. One Hundred Years of Solitude, a classic that captures the world and its intricacies in the town of Macondo. Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky of Open Wounds, my poem collection of the year. Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, where two unlikely women overcome enormous obstacles in the Taliban-run Afghanistan. Will you please be quiet, please?, my short story collection of the year.

Non-fiction: Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, a summary of a fascinating yet controversial field of medicine. People of The Lie, an investigation into human evil and ways of healing it. Hyperfocus, a book that shaved hours off my study time. Clear Thinking, a handbook for understanding our biases.

Movies/TV/anime: Beef, an examination into the consequences of our actions. Severance, a sci-fi series that completely took me by surprise with a ridiculous cliffhanger. Coach Carter, a lesson on education and mentorship and provided the best movie scene of the year. Fight Club, which takes the plot twist of the year. Season Finale of Attack on Titan, the best anime series I have watched.

Games: I adored Dave the Diver on the Switch, which I binged in the middle of my exam season. Occasionally I get the itch to play Guild Wars 2, my favourite MMORPG, and it always hits the spot.

Lastly, this blog has grown a modest amount since the start of this year in terms of subscribers and readers. Getting emails and comments from strangers is always surprising, given I predominantly write for myself, but touching. Thank you for those who read and support – publicly or quietly.

Looking forward to what the future holds. Cheers to a new 2024.

Last week I handed in an essay. It was on an ethical dilemma I had seen during my psychiatry placement, and after discussing it with my supervisor, he suggested I write it up and send it to him by the end of the week. I agreed.

The essay wasn’t very good. I only had four days to research, write, and edit and was sick for two of them. It only contained a dozen references, whereas most published articles have over 30. Handing it in brought me a bit of shame, knowing that it wasn’t my best work. So what my supervisor said next shocked me.

“This is really good. You should publish this.”

He proceeded to list out ways in which the piece worked and where I had done well. Then he gave some suggestions on what to add to increase the chances of acceptance. Overall, he gave me praise far higher than my expectations. I walked out of the room almost in a daze, amazed at what had just transpired.

---

One of the problems with sharing our work is the anxiety of what other people will think. What if my idea is politically incorrect? Incoherent? Grammatically unsound? It would be awful to lose the respect of peers due to something you created or said. Better to stay silent and not risk it at all, or post only safe, tested ideas.

But what I’ve noticed over the years is something obvious or low quality to you might be amazing to others. In fact, most of my most popular posts I did not expect to do well at all. Conversely, some of the posts I put lots of effort and feeling into received little attention.

This should be encouraging, then, to show our work. Because maybe the idea you have isn’t so bad after all. It might be much better than you could ever imagine. Only way to find out is to throw it all into the abyss.

There were five of us in the room and I was the youngest. The topic of discussion was what features distinguished millennials from Gen Z.

“Harry Potter,” one person suggested. “I remember lining up for the books as they were published and reading them overnight.”

“Wired broadband,” another chimed. Murmurs of agreement. I nodded my head too, remembering the first time I discovered WiFi and thinking it magic.

“Wait, when were you born?” All eyes turned to me.

“1998.” Gasps and snickers. “You’ve been talking like you’re one of us. But you’re a Gen Z!” Some people looked genuinely shocked. I was just as shocked as they were. Why was I being accused? Didn’t a millennial end at the year 2000? That’s what made sense to me given the name. But turns out the millennials are generally defined as being born between 1981 – 1996, which nudged me out.

My identity wobbled in that moment. I assumed my whole life that Gen Z – the generation defined by TikTok, extreme rates of depression, and short attention spans – were the generation below me. Finding myself part of this crowd, the one I had teased for so many years, seemed like a cosmic mistake. I realised then how much of a rude awakening being corrected can be.

“Don’t worry,” my friend said, noticing my shock. “We’ll accept you as an honorary member.”

Jordan B Peterson recently interviewed Aaron Stark, a public speaker and mental health advocate who once nearly became a school shooter. The interview dives into Aaron’s childhood, exploring his hellhole of violence, abuse, neglect, self-harm, and hatred, and his ultimate redemption out of it.

When Aaron was 16, he stole weed from his parents’ house and traded for a gun. It was from the local street gang which he knew well. It would take three days before they could get a gun to him. Three days. In three days, he would take this gun, shoot up a nearby school – the result of months of meticulous planning – before finally shooting himself.

On the last day before getting the gun, Aaron went to his friend Mike’s house. Aaron was in tears. Without question, Mike brought Aaron into his bedroom and stayed with him for a while. “You’re a good kid in a shit world.” Mike told him repeatedly. The two then shared some food, watched a movie, and stayed up chatting into the late night. He stayed there for five days. This small act of unexpected and unconditional kindness was the antidote to the hatred and violence that was tormenting Aaron. While staying at Mike’s, he never received the gun, and never carried out the plan.

“It wasn’t hanging out with a friend that saved my life.” Aaron said. “When I knocked on his door, I felt that I was a walking ball of nothing waiting to explode. But what [Mike] did was he put the granular bits of being a person back on the shelf of my life.”

Today, Aaron is a TEDx speaker, is married, and a strong advocate for mental health.

Despite his years of trauma and abuse, manifesting itself in a desire to strongly hurt other people, Aaron was saved. Not by money, stable housing, or even medications. Love was the answer.

It is in the depths of darkness where love shines brightest.

On the way to work one week, I managed to hit every single red light. There are 12 in total, which meant 12 times I had to brake, stop, get off my bike, wait, watch for a green light, push off, get on my bike, and accelerate. It was far more mentally and physically exhausting than my usual commute.

Last week, I was sick and wasn’t able to write as much as I would’ve liked to. Now, after that hiatus, writing feels a lot harder than I remember.

These two cases illustrate something about rest and inertia. In the productivity realm, there is a strong case for showing up daily. Doing things even you don’t want to. There are many reasons for this which James Clear covers in Atomic Habits: the 1% rule, the power of identity, etc. But one reason I haven’t seen discussed as much is the idea of inertia. It is far easier to produce something when you have a streak of action; where your body is used to it. To take a break, then come back, might seem like a well deserved rest. But I think it can be a net increase in energy. Just like it is far easier to continuously pedal without stopping on a bike, so it is with other things.

Once, on a rainy night, I left the hospital and began the cycle home. The sky was dark and my front light had run out of battery so I rode at a snail’s pace, carefully avoiding the passing cars. Yet as I was entering the city on a downward slope, a gust of wind blew me off balance and my wheels slipped. I braked firmly enough to lower the impact force, but could not avoid toppling sideways onto the road, where one second later, a car came flying past, swerving wildly to narrowly avoid my arm. He yelled some obscenity out the window which I couldn’t hear through the rain.

Getting back up on the bike was a religious experience of sorts. Had I been one second slower, or the car one second faster, we certainly would have collided, and there was no knowing what damage that could have done.

Now when I ride home safely I do not take it for granted. Serendipity is the mother of gratitude.

One of my supervisors once suggested that medical students should be curious about the world. We should watch movies, read books, attend concerts, try hobbies, listen to songs; anything to broaden our experience. The more unconventional the space, the better. I thought this was decent advice but didn’t think too much of it.

A few weeks later, a patient with depression was admitted onto the ward. We found out on her history that she hadn’t smiled in weeks and spent most days locked in her room.

I watched as my supervisor assessed her, asking a range of open questions, until stumbling upon a shared esoteric interest: how to grow a particular type of chilli. Immediately, the patient grew more animated, speaking rapidly and with greater fervour. After my supervisor shared a story about a certain type of soil, the patient gave a great long laugh.

It cut through the room like light engulfing darkness.

Lately, I have been learning a lot about psychiatry. It has led to seeing the world through a peculiar lens.

I now find myself doing mental state examinations on strangers in the street; assessing elderly peoples’ gait for Parkinsonian symptoms; on the lookout for bright, flashy clothing that could indicate mania or histrionic personality disorder; doing psychodynamic therapy – on myself. Most of this unconsciously.

It sometimes works out. I watched Fight Club for the first time last week, and guessed within ten minutes that it was a case of dissociative identity disorder (spoilers, sorry). But other times, it’s not very productive.

I was catching up with a friend recently and realised I wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying. He had made a comment about his childhood earlier and I was distracted wondering how it might have affected his current predicament. When I snapped out of it, he had stopped talking and was gazing at the sunset. It was beautiful. I nearly missed both things: the sight, and what he had been saying.

We all see the world through a certain filter – this is unavoidable. But when the filter blinds us from the world itself, it is a time to pause and reflect.

I used to believe that a new season, new year, or any major life event would announce itself with a great ruckus, and time onwards would change in light of it. As if the transition from 2022 to 2023, one’s graduation, or the death of a loved one would bring a new smell to it; a palpable shift in the atmosphere.

But summer came two days ago and it was disappointing. More than disappointing, actually – it completely failed at its job. I woke up, looked outside the window and was met with grey, rainy skies. Inside the hospital, staff were all wearing coats and jackets and the heater had to be turned on. The heater, in summer!

Of course, one should expect less from arbitrary designations of the climate. But I think it is natural to look forward to things.