Auckland, January 2023
Welcome to MAD TO LIVE, a space where I share glimpses into my life as a doctor and a mother.
In the beginning this website was a blog recounting my early days in New Zealand: the exhilarating and lonely experience of exploring a new country, a new culture, a new way of practicing medicine. I wanted it to help negate the immensity of the distance between myself and my friends and family.
As my life here has taken root and my career progressed, the blog posts have become centred around the new themes of my life. While these tend to vary from year to year, or season to season, and are often interspersed with periods where the blog becomes dormant as something else in life takes hold, the underlying motivation for me to share my thoughts and experiences remains the same: to facilitate connection and conversation with existing friends, and perhaps to a lesser extent, to illustrate to others the way in which I am learning to build a life around the demands of a career in medicine – something that would have been encouraging for a younger me to read at an earlier stage in my training. It can be difficult to retain a sense of identity and balance in a profession that often consumes huge amounts of your time and emotional availablity. I am still learning to do so with every new chapter of my life – most recently motherhood. My baby son was born at the end of 2022.
Of course, I also write simply because I enjoy writing.
Every now and then I send out a newsletter to round up recent posts. If you would like to receive this, please sign up. And if you’d like to get in touch, I always love to hear from you.
existing’s tricky: but to live’s a gift
Mad to Live 