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Today, another day of helping out with interviews, I was asked by one of my friends helping out:

“Are you emo or is it just your hair?”

Though that was in passing conversation and I’m sure they didn’t think much of it at the time I replied that I do have inclinations towards being emo. Thinking about it more throughout the day and night as I usually think about unimportant things I thought I might check the definition of “emo”:

Since the Oxford dictionary brings up 28 entries and none of them stop before the “t”, I thought Wikipedia might say something:

Emo (pronounced /ˈiːmoʊ/) is a style of rock music which describes several independent variations of music with common stylistic roots. - Wikipedia

Of course, describing people by the style of music they listen to is way too superficial for me, and I have tastes in various kinds of modern music. That’s almost playlistism, that description; playlistism being a term coined very recently (though not by me) meaning judgement of people according to the music they listen to. According to Wikipedia’s evil twin Uncyclopedia:

Emo (from Latin: “to buy, purchase”, pronounced eeee-moe) is a type of subculture (rather distinctly from the 21st Century) loosely rooted around punk rock with its own distinct style of music, fashion, argot and other trappings in a desperate, though ultimately hopeless attempt to pronounce their uniqueness.

Hm. Still no, cause I definitely don’t exclusively listen to emo music or dress like one. yay! I’m also quite content at the moment. Thereby making me not the aforementioned emo. Except for one thing I left out at the start that could qualify, and that would be writing poetry that I consider quite dark, and that would be the inclination.

I don’t post all my poetry on here, because some of it is really really really personal, but so far I’ve noticed a bit of a trend, and that trend involves slipping into an emo-like persona to write stuff that is quite depressing and involves quite a bit of death. I remember in high school there was a teacher (one of the amazingly good ones at teaching) that was asking us why death is such a taboo and why not have a conversation right now about death. Yes, lets talk about death *goes off and talks about acceptance of death and how it is an event we should not be afraid of and what there could even be after death and goes off on some random but interesting tangent*. I never had that teacher per se, but I was taught by him when he ran special days. And that would be it. Except for med school. This would be perhaps why it is relevant. Though death is second nature to us in medicine because the reality is that we are going to be surrounded by it anyway, in doing stuff in personal development where I have heard that doctors become really desensitised to death (as we are, as is evident by the second week of anatomy classes) I decided I wasn’t going to be like one of those and went the complete opposite way. In fact, if medicine is all about not feeling the same as your patient but pretending to understand (termed “empathy” by all the prep courses and all the med schools and taught to be good as a coping strategy) I don’t think I even want to learn to be empathic. I want to feel the same as the patients I have. Screw the empathy.

Hello sympathy. I know I’m not dying (and hopefully not for a long time) but I read stuff that I write and some of it could seriously have been written by someone who was. And some of it is even beautifying death. It makes me realise why some people (myself included) like to watch tragedy (and it isn’t for the adrenalin rush that the English teachers at school claimed) - it is because you can feel sad with the characters for the characters. I wasn’t joking when in that “Motivation” post I said I wanted to sit by a dying patient and listen to their stories.

I think perhaps I may only be inwardly emo. Bear in mind this doesn’t mean depressed and I’m not going to go and kill myself any time soon. I’m not going to cut my wrists any time soon, I’m not going to convince myself that life isn’t worth living and I’m not going to kill anyone (on purpose, stupid thing I have to put in here cause of medicine…). I will still however write poems about death and broken people and broken relationships and I will enjoy it, and I will sit by sad people and talk to them and be sad with them. If that makes me emo so be it, I don’t really care about that facebook photo being tagged “emo”. (N.B. I was under the influence of alcohol at the time and therefore am not responsible.) Heck, if that IS emo, I might even wear eyeshadow or something like that.

Anyway, that has got to be one of my more insane moments though easily not the most insane. If you are emo and you consider yourself to be so then I have nothing against you and apologise for anything that I might have said in this post that could offend you. In fact, I sincerely hope you get into med school (that is, if you want to) because I think you will become the sensitive doctors of tomorrow. As of now, I must sleep so that I can be awake again to see more of the doctors of tomorrow. I’ll leave with a poem:

Untitled

If you were to breathe your last
And I were there to see it,
I’d catch it in a special jar
And close the lid and keep it.

If you were to speak your last
And I were there to hear it,
I’d write it down and hang it up
And for my life live by it.

If you were to love your last
And I were there to feel it,
I’d follow you to heaven or hell
And never think twice of it.

And if I were to be your last,
I would be yours forever,
And if you were to be mine too
We’d both depart together.

Anthony Chuah