Or self-fulfilling prophecy, depending on how you look at it, I suppose. It all depends on who exactly reads my blog, I suppose.

Enough of being cryptic.

I think—I think—I’ve snapped out of it.

This episode of insanity reminds me of Frodo Baggins’ fate after he fulfills the task of destroying the One Ring. Every year on the anniversaries of his wounding on Weathertop, and the destruction of the Ring in Mt Doom, he basically loses it. (I found an interesting article that deconstructs why Frodo needed to leave the Shire and go to Aman, analyzing things in terms of PTSD.)

Except there have got to be a few Septembers where I didn’t go nuts. OK, maybe I did my brooding last year in August, and the year before that, I had my episodes while on vacation. Hmm. The year before that I thought I was relatively OK. I mean, I was exhausted and moderately physically ill from my first ward month at the Childrens’ Hospital, but I recovered reasonably well during my vacation. Two years before that, as a third year in med school, I did OK. Sure, it was in the aftermath of another disasterous outcome, but, hey, what are you going to do?

Fine. I guess Septembers are just bad for me. I blame the fact that school starts in autumn. So there.

There’s got to be a way to be able to think about the past and not go mad.

To imagine that one could have done better may be more tolerable than to face the reality of utter helplessness.