Love. Time. Death. I’m sitting on the plane heading back to summer school watching “Collateral Beauty,” and in the opening scene Will Smith talks about how we long for love, wish for more time, and fear death. These things are a theme in everyone’s life, but they have really truly been at the forefront of my mind in the last year or so.

Love. We long for love. I grew up in a house, and a family, full of love. The love in my family is what makes us strong, what makes me strong. I have never doubted for a second that I am important so someone, somewhere, and I think that’s where I get a lot of my confidence. There are plenty of doubts I have about who I am or what I am doing, and I may fail at everything, but I know it’s not who I am. Even if I fail a test, or mess up in the lab, or if a boy doesn’t text me back, those failures say nothing about ME. The kind of failure I’m not okay with is failing to be there for a friend. Or failing to tell my family I love them every day.

Time. More time. Maybe it’s because I’m still young, but I don’t have this need for ‘more time’ quite yet. I’m still in that stage of my life where I cannot wait to be a grown up, to be settled and happy and fulfilled. My accident made time stand still for a period, but I hit the ground running once I was back on my feet because I felt that I had a lot to prove to myself and everyone else. I don’t wish to have MORE time, I want time to pass. I want this accident farther behind me, I want my face to be back to normal. I want to be able to let my mind wander without flashing back to scenes in the hospital. I want to skip to the part where I can look back on this and feel grateful for what this has taught me. I want to skip to the part where I can tell a patient that I understand what they are going with, and that I am here for them.

Death. We fear death. I hadn’t thought much about it until March 13. That poem that is so iconic by Dylan Thomas in which he says “do not go gentle into that good night,/…/rage, rage against the dying of the light.” never made much sense to me. I kind of always imagined that death would be peaceful, but had never thought too much about how or why it would happen. Then suddenly, much earlier than I could have ever imagined, the sun was setting and that good night was approaching. And I raged. I raged with everything I had. For myself, for my family, for my future. I never thought that I was a ‘fighter’ until I had to be one. I am confronted with my mortality almost daily, and it scares the shit out of me, but I persist. Unfortunately, death is not something anyone can defy, but we are control of everything that happens before then.