I was unable to move forward until I’d named what I wanted to leave behind.

the unbearable about-ness of being. By “about-ness” I meant that I felt disconnected from myself, abstracted from my own life.

“What if there isn’t a solution because there isn’t a problem?”

Now it’s not at all unusual for doctors to begin their careers knowing they want to do something in addition to practicing medicine. In fact, a dean at Harvard Medical School tells incoming students to begin thinking from the outset of their careers about what their “hyphen” will be: Physician-scientist? Physician-educator? Physician-advocate?

But instead of doing what most people would do when they think they need therapy, call their insurance company to find out which therapists are covered, ask friends for referrals, see their primary care provider, I did what most doctors would do, which is to say that I asked for help while pretending I didn’t actually need help.

“How focused we become in our little areas, and how easy it is to lose sight of the daily fears and concerns of our patients,”

even at one of the world’s great academic medical centers you can easily declare yourself an expert in a condition that no one else wants to deal with.

Medical judgment requires a degree of objectivity that doctors can’t be expected to have regarding ourselves and our loved ones, and this lack of objectivity can lead to harm.

I’d often told medical students that every illness is psychosomatic—involving both the mind and body—