An Open Letter

I'll be honest with you.

When I graduated in 2024, I thought I'd finally feel it — that arrival, that quiet settling into yourself that you imagine comes with finishing something so enormous. Instead I felt excited and devastated and completely hollowed out, all at once. Like I'd been so focused on becoming a doctor that I hadn't noticed I'd misplaced myself somewhere along the way.

FY1 started and I did what I always do when things get too loud inside — I looked outward. New people, new friendships, new reasons to keep moving forward. And it helped. It genuinely did. But I can see now, with the honesty that only comes at night when you stop performing, that I was also using all of it. The busyness. The bonds. The constant forward motion. Using it to stay one step ahead of the anxiety and the grief I hadn't given myself permission to feel. It worked, for a while. The way things that aren't solutions tend to work —just long enough to convince you they are.

Then I met her.

I won't say too much. But she made me fall back in love with medicine in a way I hadn't expected and couldn't have manufactured on my own. She made the whole thing feel alive again. And so I chased it — chased surgery, chased the dream, chased this version of myself that felt worthy of the people who believed in me. I ran toward it with everything I had.

But lately, in the quiet moments I can't escape, I've been asking myself a question that frightens me a little: was that ever my dream? Or was I living hers, and just never stopped long enough to notice?

I genuinely don't know. And that not-knowing is the thing I'm sitting with right now.

F2 is ending soon. And unlike every transition before this one, there's no automatic next step waiting. No new rotation. No structure to absorb me. Just me, two years older, standing in almost exactly the same place I stood at graduation — except this time the silence is louder because I know myself well enough now to know I can't keep outrunning it. Surgery still feels like the answer when I ask myself the question directly. I want it. But if I'm being truthful about why — it's not entirely clean. Some of it is genuine passion. Some of it is that I simply cannot picture myself anywhere else in that hospital, which feels like it must mean something. And some of it, if I'm really being honest, is the need to prove something to myself. To know that I was capable of one of the hardest things there is. That I didn't just survive medicine — that I could master a part of it.

Is that enough of a reason to build a life around? I'm still working that out.

What I find harder to say is this: my family believes in me with a completeness that takes my breath away. Their support has carried me through things I couldn't have gotten through alone. But love like that comes with weight, and I don't always know how to hold both things at once — the gratitude and the pressure, the warmth and the fear of being the man who finally lets them down after everything they've given. I carry it quietly. Most days it pushes me forward. Some days it just feels like something else I'm not allowed to put down.

I think I've been in a slump. A long one. And I think the only way out of it is to stop rearranging the furniture and actually answer the question I've been avoiding: what do I want?

Not what makes sense. Not what would make everyone proud. Not what *she* made me feel.

What is my dream, when it's just mine?

This Ramadan I'm going to try to find out. I want to ask for forgiveness — for the time I've wasted, the clarity I've avoided, the version of myself I've neglected. I want to rebuild something in my deen that I've let slip. Because every time I've tried to find solid ground in this dunya, in the plans and the people and the rotations and the goals, it has shifted under my feet. The only thing that hasn't is God. And I think I've been too proud, or too busy, or too scared to lean on that the way I should.

Allah is the best of planners. I have to believe that. I'm choosing to believe that.

And yes — I'm frustrated. I won't pretend otherwise. The idea that this might take a whole year, that I have to sit in this uncertainty for that long, makes me feel something close to rage some days. A whole year. When I'm already tired. When I've already been patient. When I just want to know who I'm becoming and start becoming him. But I'm still here. Still asking the questions. Still showing up to the job every day even when the job doesn't feel like mine yet.

And maybe that's enough for now. Maybe that's actually everything.

— A doctor. Still figuring it out. Trying to make it his.