It Is My Birthday

A meditation on the relentless march of time

I have turned 45 today. I hate my birthday. I'm not sure that it's so much the day, but the date. May 6 is a perfectly good day, unless, of course, you would like to do something nice on your birthday. As a dual board-certified child and adult psychiatrist, I've done a lot of years of school. May is a beautiful month. Spring is a lovely time. It is also the end of the academic year when you've had as many academic years as your author; what is almost surely the case is that what happens on your birthday is an exam or obligation. I took no pre-medical classes in college because I was trying to prevent myself from medical school matriculation. In my Amherst College era, hubris, I thought I could reduce the risk of becoming a physician to zero simply by not taking the courses necessary to apply to medical school. This proved quixotic. Post-baccalaureate programs exist. You could do college after college to knock out those prerequisites, and I did. I did six years of college, inclu…