There’s a moment I return to often. Not a grand revelation—just a quiet one.
I was sanding the banister in our front stairwell. The light was coming in sideways, catching the dust in the air like snow. My hands were sore, my coffee cold. And for the first time in weeks, I wasn’t thinking about patients or projects or who I needed to become next. I was just… there. Breathing. Working. Whole.
I think that’s who I am beneath all the names.
We wear so many: doctor, partner, brother, friend. Each one honorable. Each one a kind of offering. But they’re not the self. They’re the shell. The scaffolding. And if we’re not careful, we begin to believe that the structure is the soul.
When I stepped back from full-time medicine, I feared losing that scaffolding. Who am I if I’m not always needed? If I’m not on call, not publishing, not keeping pace with a system that moves faster than life? But slowly, in the quiet, I began to notice something deeper. The part of me that still paused at a sunrise. That cried at poetry. That placed a hand on a laboring woman’s shoulder not because it was protocol—but because it was human.
The essential self, I’ve learned, is not efficient. It doesn’t climb ladders or update resumes. It remembers childhood dreams. It knows what song to play when words fail. It feels at home in silence.
When we strip away the noise, the doing, the roles—we don’t become less. We become known. To ourselves, if not to others. And in that knowing, there’s peace.
I’m still a physician. Still a partner. Still renovating a house that will never be finished. But when I stand in that stairwell, dusty and tired, I remember: I am not what I achieve. I am what I notice. What I love. What I choose to hold sacred.
That, I think, is the essential self. Not a role, but a rhythm.
- Michael