FIND YOUR MOSH PIT | Andrew Suchan
Picture this: It’s Friday night and you’re getting packed into a basement scented with sawdust and stale beer. You’re shoulder to shoulder with a hundred other people with fuses ready to blow. Patchwork jackets, comedically large spiky belts, bracelets stacked up to the elbow, goth makeup, increasingly obscure band shirts, sky-high platforms, glitter everywhere. The guitarist strums a solitary note, and the room DETONATES. Sweat descends and bodies collide like popcorn in a microwave. You’re smashing forearm against forearm and foot against shin, faltering back to the edge until a push from behind. The singer screams, “Side to side!”, and you line up like a football kickoff to crash into each other. Someone shouts, “Circle pit!”, and you’re skipping and frolicking in a ring, faster and faster while the singer yells along. A crowd surfer glides toward the stage; another launches off it like a cannonball.
To your left, someone’s reenacting moves from Street Fighter. How is he not dislocating his shoulders? To your right… are they pretending to shop for groceries? Never mind that; you get thrown around from one corner to the other because the chorus to your favorite song just hit, and you’re screaming every word into the ceiling. The greatest. Everyone has the widest grins as passion flows out. And yet, they always stop to scoop people off the ground or hold up lost items (“Apple Watch!”). For a few hours, no one calls me “doctor.” I’m just another person in this beautiful community, and I feel free.
The drenching perspiration and the odd bruises on my hips, thighs, arms, chest, and sometimes head, are badges of honor. Tigers Jaw, Pinkshift, Sweet Pill: these punk bands contributed to some of my proudest memories of intern year. Once, a few guys motioned that they’d lift me, all 6’5” of me, to crowd surf. So I did. I lost my voice, a lot. The bands’ political, rapturous monologues galvanized me. I hugged and high-fived strangers because we had moshed together. I rowed on the ground with a dozen people. I hopped on the floor like a frog during “Frog on the Floor.” I helped crowd surf a guy in a wheelchair. I found a community I didn’t know I needed, when my life was always about my profession. I love medicine, and I never wanted to do anything else as a career. However, we all need other avenues.
It’s easy to forget who you are when your life is the hospital. I needed something to burst that bubble. I can freely disengage from my other responsibilities for a short time and absorb myself into the music and the people. In my second year, I was going through a particularly hard week: burnout, discouragement, exhaustion, dejection, fatigue, all of it. I thought going to work would distract me, but since the root of those feelings was intrinsically related to my job, it only fed my hunger for something different.
I decided to swap shifts with one of my co-residents to see Sweet Pill in D.C., my third time that year. Significantly, this was their first show here as headliners. This was the therapy I needed. Their songs bring both a melancholic nostalgia and bittersweet confessions with enough drive to still dance and shout. The drums cascade into each other like shimmering waterfalls, the guitars twinkle, and the vocals are incisive and anguished. As I stepped into the dimly lit venue, my thoughts were still scattered like jigsaw pieces. This dissipated as a smile spread across my face, as Sweet Pill was coming on in 30 minutes. I already knew all their rituals – they’re all from Philadelphia, but one of their guitarists is from New Jersey, so we must boo him. We bark to “Dog Song.” I know every single lyric. I envisioned how I was going to mosh and headbang to all of it. They always play “Fate,” “Red String,” and “Cut” together, just like their album, and the room gets more tense until the explosion in the final breakdown in “Cut.” Everyone slams into each other without care for health, screaming “YOU CAN’T CUT ME OUT!”
I get profound, full-body chills just writing about this concert again. I cried there. Every song was a battle that we were going to conquer together. After, I walked out, an ocean of sweat, my voice battered from the yelling. I was rehabilitated, refreshed, and revitalized. I was me again, and I could tackle anything (and anyone).
Three years earlier, I would’ve been terrified. However, I took the chance and dared myself to try something different. You don’t need to be reckless, but you need to be present. The contract is simple: throw yourself in, watch out for each other, give everything for three minutes, then breathe. You aren’t defined by your work, but it is a part of you. You can celebrate the fruits of your labor, even in the constant time crunch of residency. You won’t remember the time you chose to work late just to tidy a few more things.
What do I remember from residency? Being together and present with people I truly cared about. Lifting up each other when we’re down. When I cried, my co-intern was there to put his hand on my shoulder and cry with me. I was renewed to go to work again. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs remained on my mind throughout this; to achieve self-actualization, we need to find something innate that we can grip for dear life, even if circumstances change. The residents, the attendings, the students, the nurses, the techs, and many others shape our internal community, and it’s our relationships with them that will weather any storm. I’m more empathetic, more patient, more human. I also thought of Sisyphus, though not as a tragedy as most perceive, but as an inspirational hero; Camus provided my favorite interpretation with his ending to The Myth of Sisyphus: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
We can complain about the long nights, the feelings of inadequacy, the faults of our healthcare system. At its worst, residency feels like trying to physically move the Sun. However, we shouldn’t force ourselves to become miserable; the tale of Sisyphus can easily be seen as crushing and despairing, but like residency, there is hope we can gleam from it. Finding joy in the connections we create and the people we help allows us to laugh at these impossible circumstances. Even if your boulder rolls down, you should still appreciate the view from so high up and the winding path that got you there. One day, your boulder will reach the summit just as mine, and you can reminisce about shoving that God-forsaken rock and about who helped you with a gentle push. You’re never pushing alone.
Andrew Suchan is a motility and neurogastroenterology fellow with Johns Hopkins, having just graduated residency in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview. He loves going to concerts, playing volleyball, discussing music, and writing narrative medicine stories about the emotional experience of work and training.