Gray Matter: The Stranger

When the future feels like hands around your throat... Stephen is no stranger to continuous change. The pandemic struck in his first year at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and the effects are lingering a little longer than he'd like. Now that he's an M3, the arduous study sessions, stressful clerkships, and hushed conversations with his preceptors have shaped him into a very different person-one his family doesn't recognize, and one he's not sure he likes. He's leaned on his loved ones for guidance in the past, but the passage of time has changed them too. Every visit home leaves him searching fruitlessly for the simplicity of his younger years. And when tragedy strikes his best friend's family one summer, the agony of growing older comes to visit once again. In the wake of grief, Stephen must face a version of himself he's never met before. And his future asks him to make a terrible choice: between the intoxication of familiarity and the anxiety of freedom.