Beginner's Theater: I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV

Lately,  I haven't slept well.  It's not stress (I think); It's not caffeine (lies), It's not the paper-thin walls where I can hear every last apneic gargle/grunt/snore/choke from the neighbor next door.
Underlying sleeping disorders aside, I keep waking up to memories. Specifically, songs. This isn't abnormal; most people call them dreams, sans the visuals. But Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday all yielded a similar routine of 11pm, toss/turn, sleep, wake at 2AM, something on my mind. Lyrics. Music. Routines. Lines. Dialogues. An omnipresent musical backdrop, a mental movie-montage that punctuated my sacred REM time.

Some of these memory-dream-things date back as far as 2007; a familiar sense of a resonating, ground shaking bass from Grease dress rehearsal, the melody to an overplayed, over-covered Journey song in a summer stock while slapping a wireless mic to my sweaty face backstage, silently freaking out about an impending ball-change, pas de bourre, pirouette, leap, sing, jump.

My sleep specialist tells me, "Veronica, if you can't fall back asleep within 30 minutes and you feel rested; get up.  Make breakfast.  Start your day."

And so, at 2 or 3AM, there I am, cooking eggs and planning my outfit for the gym, which won't open for another 4 hours.  And while I open a book, or another laptop, I have even more time for my already busy mind to race for the 1000th time and think about why I'm sitting exactly where I am today.
This theme of mine (which you should get used to for the next 4 years); this motif of really taking a step back to look at the person you've become and continue to evolve into dictates much of what I choose to do, how I choose to behave and how I interact with others.

I keep thinking: Veronica, you are so dumb. Why are you worried about the person you are?  It's weird.  It seems narcissistic.  It seems self-absorbed.  It seems way too introspective. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO STUDY.  When will you STAY somewhere? Will  you ever go back to California?  Do you WANT to go back to California? When, more importantly, where, will you (::shudder::) ever settle.

And I realize, sometimes I lie awake at night after these weirdly irritating musical-theme dreams, that when I'm stressed (always) I have the tendency to fall back on those memories and rituals that are safe and habitual, those formative experiences and circumstances that made me brave enough to be in front of 400 people, although I claim to dislike many, to be afraid of many.

My first test in Cardio/Renal/Pulm was less than satisfying.  About 5% short of satisfying.  And so, to ensure that I was never 5% short again (not hard when SPEC committee gives you the proverbial slap on the wrist speech) I did as any good Theater major should.

I rehearsed.
I rehearsed because that's what I know. I never was good at memorizing things I could not feel, things I could not touch or ascribe an emotion to.  But I am good at anthropomorphizing. When it came to scripts in Theater; that was fine. Pages and pages of lines memorized word for word; committed inflections, concomitant actions, the right walk here, an appropriately-timed head turn there, the perfect pregnant pause right before a gun-shot goes off in the distance, the way you had to move and flinch to make it look real for every audience member watching your every move.

That was easy.  And here I was, eating my eggs, feeling sorry for myself before the crack of dawn, because I can't "memorize" 40 kinds of Cardiomyopathies.  40!  It seems nominal, silly, trivial now.  40 diseases and yet my whole undergraduate (and prior) MO was based on method acting. Stanislavski (for the people who are shaking their heads saying 'Veronica, make sense please': he was a famous Russian actor and theater director who formed the groundwork of the discipline I "studied") approached theater as a serious endeavor requiring dedication, discipline and integrity. Throughout this dude's life, he scrutinized and subjected his own acting to a process of intense artistic self-analysis & reflection. Stanislavski's system, specifically,  is a progression of techniques used to train thespians to elicit believable emotions in their performances. His technique evolved to be a method of physical actions whereby emotions are produced through the use of actions. For example, if an actor needed to cry, he could sigh and hold his head in his hands, a physical manifestation that many who are weeping instinctively do. On stage, if an actor experiences only internal feelings or only physical actions, then the performance is pretty much useless. Stanislavski's reasoning was that there ought to be the union of psychological and physical to make a performance come "alive". The two go hand-in-hand and are not mutually exclusive.

Yea yea yea ok, who cares.  True to the med student mantra: "How does this relate to school and do we need to know it for the test?"

Well, for me, actually....yes.  

It was weird. It was annoying.  But it's how my brain works.  And so, for every pathology, every disease, every medical jargon we were given...I gave them attributes. I imagined people-patients, or myself.  I told the "story" of the disease.  And even when the narrative was abstract or strange, I turned it into a logical one.  I had to. And only then did physiology start to make more sense.  I could see it.  I could understand how it affected people beyond an obfuscated vignette that began with "a patient presents with...."

And it's cool if you think it's bizarre. Because...it is.  

And somehow, by the grace of God or Stanislavski-God or that crazy gypsy San Franciscan fortune teller who said everything would work itself out....it did.

I finally passed.  Like, for real passed.  Passed without a curve passed.  I still inherently struggle; that won't change.  I won't become a CRP savant overnight (or probably ever).  And good old Stan probably won't be much help come Neuro.  But for now, it works.

For now.  For now, I am still a borderline crazy person who needs to figure out how to stay asleep past 3AM (unlikely).  For now, I am still afraid that suddenly this won't work out and I'll be where I was before with no system, no working method, forced to just "memorize...because...you do" for Test 3.
But I have a week to relish in super minor successes of the month, like successfully half-embalming a person (gross, yea, but pretty cool too), and running 8 miles in one day without dying, and asking that one guy to ask that OTHER guy if the latter guy has a girlfriend. Tertiary inquisitions are way harder than they seem, trust me. I have a Master's in Awkward and know all about it.

It's 9:48PM, which means it's time to do dramaturgy...and by that, I mean note-taking, for lectures tomorrow.  Because that girl who didn't know jack about medicine is employing every means possible to act like a student of  medicine. From what I've observed, apparently it's a lot of pacing, freaking out, buying study aids you don't need, and pretending you know more than you do.

But that's a pretty good method if I've seen one. And as an audience, I'm pretty sure you're buying it. :)

xo,
V