Redemption Arc

As a child, I could effortlessly lose myself in the breadth of my imagination moments before I dozed off to sleep. Glow-in-the-dark stars littered the ceiling of my childhood bedroom, reflecting faint patches of light in a darkness that hugged me to a deep slumber. Each evening, I’d glance up at those stars with a noisy stillness despite the internal turbulence I’d created unbeknownst to myself or anyone around me. My mind had always taken on a preemptive liking to realism, as I crafted detailed depictions of my adult life or probed through my naive misunderstandings of death and the afterlife. I never truly understood the scope of my conscious mind, even as it cradled my imagination and, later, my tribulations, motivations, and hopes until adulthood. It strung together a disheveled overthinker, a chronic over-analyzer, so much so that I had learned pretty quickly that the biggest enemy in my story was never going to be anywhere aside from mindlessly lurking inside my own head. 

Unless you’re a medical school student, you never get to see a real mind, let alone put in the arduous work to get one sitting in the palm of your hands. My dissection partners at the time had jokingly nicknamed me “bone saw” after I carved the brain out of our cadaver’s skull cap one Wednesday morning. It was an alarmingly normal task for the three of us, as we each took turns examining the lifeless organ, while also soaking in an intricate mystery we’d never be able to grasp in its entirety. We could only dust off our imaginations to illustrate how it once carried another being, something the rest of my class nor I would ever be able to convey to another person. It made me wonder, even months later, if that person ever fully grasped it themselves by the conclusion of their story.

I spent the last eight months questioning the same thing- whether the lust of my 20s swirling in my mind as a child led me astray from the person I’d hoped to be by the end of my first year of medical school. After all, during the first few years of being away from home, I’d built myself on the assurance that my self-reliance sturdily stood on knowing myself inside and out, through and through. It was like I was learning the intricacies of my inner persona; how to nourish my mind, where to fulfill voids from loneliness, what consoles my subconscious, what settles my ego. I became my own DIY project as my independent lived experiences ebbed and flowed to reveal aspects of myself I could eventually tease apart and pocket in the back of my mind. It was a project I’d believed had reached a standstill as I transitioned the following summer into medical school. All of the mental preparation and learned experiences would suffice the alleged brewing storm ahead. But despite its swift advances, I wasn’t immediately faced with the downpour warned about months earlier. Nothing that suddenly swept me off the tracks of an ordered balance to crumble the trust I’d established in myself. Instead, it was the redundancies of the days, the desires for the weekend, and the yearning to finish the next exam that cast a billowing dark cloud on my new normal. Each day felt like a darker, heavier cloud motioning for a persistent searing lull until three months blinked by like time wasn’t anything but a passing afterthought.

I’d made countless attempts to process the last few months. It appeared as though every thought had been frozen in its time, reflected in the empty pages of a journal concealed with dust. Even as my most conventional methods for relief failed, I randomly found solace in watching niche Instagram reels that blended Stoic principles with anime clips. So, once I returned, I’d garnered the strength to brave the following six months and mask old wounds with remnants of hope, even if it was weighed down by cumbersome uncertainty. It was different this time. Each day smoothly rolled over into weekend trips and regular evening celebrations, where time felt less threatened by the sinking minutes that a ten-minute walk outside once seemed to entail. Every morning, I was pulled closer to the peering light at the end of the tunnel that once appeared as a dull glow through the exhaustion. I’d finally picked up a pencil and spilled words to the brim at the turn of each page, uttering the unexpected anecdotes of a comeback I’d longed to see. It depicted the story of witnessing the Lions’ best season in thirty years and a St. Patty’s Day weekend with multiple strangers turned close friends. It pictured frolicking in Miami for my 23rd birthday with my ankle brace shoved into a pair of heels and coming home to a surprise birthday party. It became a true redemption arc; a triumph of growth and a comeback to the person and the mind that had always felt familiar. 

A comeback still cognizant of a time before this year, like when I pass by the same 16th birthday card hung in my childhood bedroom, which wrote, “You have always known your own mind, Reema, and that is your winning quality.” There were moments this year where I’d glaze over those words like they were frivolous jargon. There were other moments where I’d stare hard at those words debating whether we would ever fully know our mind, or ourselves as thoroughly as we believe. Even if your 20s are proclaimed to be a revolving door of losing yourself and finding yourself, over and over again, is there ever a true expiration date? It leaves us questioning whether we become the individuals we aspire to be, fully know and trust ourselves, or continue the search in a redundant cycle. A recurring pattern of a new chapter unfolding, a new story being written, and, alas, a new redemption arc persisting. But maybe somewhere along that journey came the realization that every redemption arc is really just a step toward becoming who I want to be, rather than rediscovering an outdated version of myself. After all, we’re our own forever DIY project, constantly reshaping and relearning to curate our inner personas, minds, and subconsciouses as the dynamic creatures we are. The ones malleable to the change in the environments we commit ourselves to while still marked by the people we once were staring at our stars before we dozed off to sleep.