A place that has been in the story for a long time.

California has always felt like home. Both of my parents were born and raised here, and summers meant piling into my grandparents' house in La Mirada. As I got older, I kept finding my way back to Laguna Beach, hopping in my grandpa's car, driving down the 5 with no particular plan beyond finding somewhere to park and getting to the ocean.

At some point, what started as a place I loved visiting became a place I quietly assumed I would end up. Apparently I was confident enough about this that, on February 14, 2014, I posted a picture of Laguna Beach on Facebook and announced that one day I would live here.

Apparently I meant it.

But for a long time, "one day" remained just that. I had built a life and a practice in Connecticut. Westport wasn't simply where I worked. It was where I grew up as a physician, built relationships with patients I deeply cared about, and created something that became very difficult to imagine leaving.

At the same time, more and more of my life was pulling me west. My sister and her family are here. Much of my extended family is here. And the idea of being closer to them, while finally building a life in a place I had imagined living for more than a decade, began to feel less like a someday plan and more like the obvious next chapter.

For years, I thought choosing Laguna meant giving up Westport. Eventually I realized it didn't have to.

Laguna Beach can be home while I continue caring for a smaller number of established Connecticut patients in a way that is personal, sustainable, and honest about what distance changes.

More than a decade after writing that I would someday live here, the timing finally feels right.

Chemistry, molecules, how things work — I've always been obsessed with that stuff. Growing up, I soaked up whatever I could.

But things really got going in high school, when I had the chance to take chemistry with a teacher who had a PhD in organic chemistry. I remember being genuinely impressed by that. It felt like she had access to this deeper, almost mysterious world of knowledge — and for the first time, I could see a path into it.

I wanted to understand how molecules were built, how they interacted, and why tiny changes could completely alter what they did.

Years later, I studied biochemistry at Virginia Tech and spent time doing research in molecular biology and synthetic organic chemistry.

I loved the science and was good at it. For a while, I genuinely wondered whether my future might be in research, academia, or industry.

That question followed me to Jülich, Germany, where I worked in an organic chemistry research laboratory surrounded by scientists doing fascinating work.

And yet something was missing. As interested as I was in the science, I kept finding myself more interested in the people.

That Was Medicine.

Around the same time, I became an EMT and began volunteering at the Free Clinic of Christiansburg in rural southwest Virginia.

I still remember driving my 1996 Altima through the Virginia countryside to that little clinic.

I learned how to take a history, listen carefully, organize a patient's story, and present what I had learned to the physicians and residents volunteering there.

I remember wearing my baggy Cherokee scrubs with an almost ridiculous amount of pride.

Something clicked. Science was still fascinating — but now there was a person attached to it. A story. A life. Contradiction. That was medicine.

The lasting influence, though, was how she lived.

My mother had a world-class ability to make people feel seen — to make them feel special, welcome, and that they were valuable. It was simply how she moved through the world.

That has stayed with me.

Years later, after medical school at UVA, residency at Yale, and nearly a decade caring for patients, I find myself returning to the same things that drew me toward medicine in the first place:

Curiosity. Careful thinking. Making something complicated understandable. And above all, a genuine interest in the person sitting in front of me. That is the kind of medicine I love practicing. And it is the kind of practice I am now building.