S5E8: In an Alternative Reality...

Hạ: Hello, hello, dear listeners. 2022. Just want to wish you a happy new year. Woohoo.

Lina: Woo.

Leen: Wow, shot down. Okay.

Hạ: I'll redo that. Okay.

Lina: I thought it was cute.

Hạ: Let me do this again. Okay.

Leen: I liked it.

Hạ: Repeat. Okay. Hello, hello, dear listeners. This is Ha, in the virtual studio, and I'm here with Mariam, Lina, and Leen. And how's everyone feeling about 2022?

Lina: Scared.

Leen: Happy third year of COVID.

Lina: I mean, I'm just keeping it real.

Mariam: Yes.

Leen: It's the year of the third COVID.

Mariam: The pandemic that won't stop.

Leen: Is it the third or the fourth?

Mariam: I lost count. I don't even know.

Hạ: I heard that now there's a variant of the Omicron variant called the stealth Omicron, so . . .

Lina: What is with these names?

Mariam: It's funny because I saw this meme that was like, "This is not the way I wanted to learn the Greek alphabet." And it's true. It's not fun.

Hạ: Well, it's a new year, and so that's always a great time for people to reflect on 2021, like Spotify Wrapped and all of that jazz, and also to set up resolutions for 2022.

And though I totally believe that we should be continually learning and unlearning, I felt that the start of a new year is a good time for us to pause and reflect. And that's exactly what my topic is for today.

I would like to talk about who would I have become in medicine without my community? So basically, we're kind of going to do a little sci-fi alternative think piece sort of thing here. And we're going to imagine an alternative reality for ourselves.

Leen: I mean, you guys don't do this all the time? This is my natural state of being.

Lina: Leen has already five alternate realities. She's like, "Which one do I choose?"

Hạ: Yeah, but all of this aside, I feel like we talk a lot about how we've been shaped by our communities and they've been touched a lot upon many other episodes. And this idea will definitely be something that we'll keep touching upon. But I really would like us to just think about who we would have been in medical school or residency at the beginning. I'm happy to start.

For some context, for those who know me, I am a bit chaotic, but I was next level chaos in college. I was really all over the place in terms of things that I liked to do, to the point that when I ended up in my medical school interviews, many people would just look at me and go, "Who are you? I don't even know what you were doing with your life for the last six years or so."

And so when I started medical school, I really believed that I had made space for my discordant passions in college. But by doing that without clear boundaries, I had been less "successful." To the listeners, I made air quotation marks when I said successful. And by doing that, I had almost derailed a lot of my initial goals, which was to really excel in biomedical engineering and research and to enter medical school.

And while I was super grateful for the space that I gave to myself to consider other careers and other passions, starting medical school I really told myself that I could not do what I did in college again. I needed to be focused. I needed to limit my passions. So I really bought into the talk that we were given in orientation that we needed to choose kind of three things to define us for our MSPI and our residency applications, and just fall back on those three things and really developing that.

I also decided that I really wanted to prioritize my academics. I wanted to be above class average in everything that I did, and that I was going to be a good student, whatever good student meant in those very capitalistic metrics.

And honestly, if things had been different and I hadn't run into such an amazing community, including the Bundles, I very well could have held steady on that path.

So I'm curious for you all, what do you think you would have been?

Mariam: I would have been a gunner, let's be real. I mean, it's funny because we talked about this earlier. Ha brought this topic up to us. This is kind of just how this topic came to be a few weeks ago. But a gunner is somebody who's always trying to be top of the class, really cares about their grades. They're very nit-picky. They're kind of super competitive, very cutthroat, which I'm sure you all are very familiar with. It's just this overarching pressure to be that way in med school. So we always talk about it. It's a term that we throw around a lot.

And upon reflecting on it, when I started med school, it was kind of similar to you, Ha. I wanted to prove myself. I wanted to prove that I belonged. The only way that I knew how to do that or I was taught to do that was to aim to be higher than class average and to "stand out." To be the top of the class, to be high achieving on paper, and kind of hit those capitalistic metrics of success.

I think we've all been impacted by that. If I'm being completely real, that's something that I still have to work on, is not putting so much weight into those capitalistic metrics of success, especially in this system where it's weighted so heavily. But I think it took me the longest time to kind of calm down a little bit and be like, "It's okay. I can invest in these other parts of myself that won't necessarily make me look good on paper, but are going to make me feel better as a human being and make me feel more connected to my process and my future patients."

So yeah, I would have probably been struggling with some hardcore gunner vibes, but that would have been me.

Leen: So actually, ironically, I don't think I would be in medicine if it wasn't for my community. I think my biggest passion for medicine originally stemmed from seeing my community under occupation, seeing them helpless under occupation.

I think my earliest memory of wanting to be a doctor was when I was . . . I had to be around 5 or 4 years old, and I remember just seeing ER kind of footage, overview footage of the ER, and there are just doctors running everywhere. As a kid, I thought they were doctors. They were all wearing white coats. It was just casualty after casualty after casualty, and I think that's when I realized I wanted to be a doctor.

So I think if that never happened to me, if I wasn't part of this community, I wouldn't have even gone into medicine.

Not saying that I regret that now that I am in medicine. I still have my community. My ideas of community always change. I find new communities. I merge communities.

I don't know if my parents would have let me go down the music route, being the whole immigrant family, but I definitely remember sitting down with my dad once in undergrad, and it was at a time where people kept telling me I would never make it to med school. I was like, "Baba, I think I'm going to go into music." And he's like, "Honestly, if you're going to be successful in it, try it. But if not, you still have to focus on your degree."

So I always wonder that. I always wonder if I would be in medicine if it wasn't for what I've experienced as a communal society or whatever.

Lina: I think, for me, I did know I wanted to go into medicine early on, even in high school. We came from Gaza and we were like, "I want to do medicine here. We can move here."

Going back, I was always the person who cared to excel academically in every way I can and cared about my grades and what I was doing in school, and didn't do much outside of kind of the main academics in a sense. And going into med school, I was like, "I'm going to be better at that. I'm going to be focused. I'm going to get the grades that I want. I'm going to be good at this," in a sense. And the only way I could define "good at this" was kind of the measures that they want you to look good in for medical school or for applications later on.

But then things kept getting worse and worse back home. Even one month into medical school, my grandmother passed, and I kind of did what I always do when things happen back home. I disassociate and I fall back onto myself and not really process things in a way. That was the first year of medical school, and it was just kind of a blur and you feel lost.

At the end of the first year, going into the summer in second year, I started finding a little bit more of my community and started opening up and realizing that there is support out there. It made me feel better in terms of how I do approach things and how I process things. And with however hard things were getting, I still had my people to fall back on. I think that really helped me be okay.

I remember the conversations we were having, Ha and Mariam, about this. And I was like, "I don't think I would have been okay, to be honest, because things just kept getting worse and worse." I might have maybe taken some time off or something. I don't know. I just know that I really needed to see how my community can be there for this and how I can be okay, because it's been hard.

Leen: But what's being a person who is not represented in medicine, who has a community not represented in medicine, going to med school without it being extra difficult, right? That's just the theme of who we are in medicine.

Lina: Exactly.

Leen: It ties with us.

Lina: For sure.

Hạ: Yeah. I sometimes feel like if I hadn't found my community, I would have lost a lot of myself.

Leen, when you were talking about how your community brought you into medicine, it made me think about when I was younger, it was seeing my family's experiences navigating the healthcare system that made me passionate about it. I wanted to empower people like my family, right?

Because of a lot of these forces all around me, I felt I was losing myself and I was playing a game in medical school that wasn't the game that I really wanted to play.

And this happened in college too. What I was reflecting a lot on as I was unpacking a lot of college . . . because college was a really hard time for me, which is another story in and of itself. But what I realized was that the problem wasn't that I was too focused on discordant passions. The problem was that I was trying to force what I loved into these capitalistic metrics of success that the world was telling me to do.

Me trying to shape myself into something that isn't me was so damaging to myself that I lost so much of myself. And I've been spending the last five years finding those pieces again and trying to reclaim them.

Lina: Oh my God, Ha. You said that so well. Yeah, I knew my passions, I knew why I wanted to get into medical school, but then I felt like I had to fit them into this little box or fit them into how they should be presented. And I worked really hard on doing that for a while, but it just didn't feel comfortable. It didn't feel like I was truly expressing myself or truly passionate about something. It just felt numbed down or something.

Mariam: Yeah, I totally understand where you guys are coming from. Something I realized, too, was nothing seemed to matter on my application or on my resume unless it was palatable to the system. And I had to make myself seem like I was self-made, when in reality we all are community-made, right? But there's this emphasis on, "You're a self-made individual. You did it all yourself."

Lina, when you were specifically talking about losing somebody very close to you and your family and kind of all the trauma that comes with that, you think about the other things that we have to experience as medical students. We're still human beings living these lives. Our families go through stuff. We go through different things, like loss. We have to grieve. We have to hold space. And the way that we do that, or at least the way that I do that or the most helpful way to do that, I should say, is with people that you love.

You shouldn't be expected to hold grief or hardship by yourself. But in this system, it's celebrated to be the self-made person and be this "resilient" person who got through it. But that's just not realistic. That doesn't necessarily make you a better doctor in the future. It makes you feel more isolated, if anything.

If any one of us has been through something, we're able to hold that space with each other, and it just makes the process feel so much more healing and more sustainable.

Leen: Also reminds me of when we apply to medical school and we try to show off these traits of how we want to represent our community, how much they exploit that branding image of us, right? They take our passions and exploit it and say, "Yes, use that. Show us that side. Show us your compassionate side. Show us the side you want to represent. Oh, but you better freaking get these standard grades, and pass these standardized tests, and do all these standard things for us. And if you don't, well, you're not as good as everybody else. You're not going to go anywhere." I hate the system. It seems like every topic goes back to that sentence.

Mariam: I know.

Lina: But remember, Leen, how excited we got when we learned there was another Palestinian in the medical school? I think we just kind of jumped at knowing each other.

Leen: Oh, when I found you, I lost it when I found you. I dragged her all through administration. I'm like, "This is my new replacement." And Dr. Baumann was like, "Leen, you're both very two different individuals." I was like, "I understand, but she's my mini me." I was so excited.

Mariam: This is so real because there are two Afghans in my class, and we're friends, and I'm so excited about it. I was telling Lina this, but that's so rare. And even just hanging out with them, I feel more connected to my mom's side, who is Afghan. It's changed everything for me.

Just kind of going back to this idea of the alternative reality, if I didn't have them or if I didn't have any friends throughout this process or anybody I could truly connect with, it's not just that I would have been a gunner, right? It wouldn't have just been me shooting for all A's or the most competitive residency, but my mental health would have been just awful and my sense of self would have been very lost.

The fact that medical school was the place for me to explore my identity a little bit more, to learn more about my mom's culture, and to kind of feel more grounded in that, that's also a very beautiful thing that I didn't expect to get out of medical school.

Hạ: And talking about mental health, I really do appreciate so much for the communities that I have found. One of the moments that was very impactful for me was actually earlier in March, I was dealing with some family stuff. And then there were the murders of the Asian women in Atlanta. It was such a devastating moment for me.

But all throughout my life, I was taught, "No, this is not the narrative that medicine wants for me. They want me to be this self-made person who will remain quiet and stoic throughout all the hardships that hit me."

Then I remember Lina literally pulled me away and she's like, "I noticed that something is wrong. Talk to me about it." And I burst into tears in that room with her, but it was so healing and it reminded me that I can still be badass and hold true to all my emotions and all the grief that I'm going through. I would not have reached that point without community that allowed me to be like that.

Lina: I'm so happy I have you. I am so happy I have you all in my life.

Leen: Harjit and I always say if we didn't have each other in med school, if we didn't find each other, we both would have flunked out of med school if we didn't find each other. It's not like we helped each other grade-wise per se, but I think each of us understanding our communities and what our communities are going through, and then connect to that every time that we felt something, always boosted our mental health and subsequently our grades and stuff.

Lina: Yeah. The content is hard and studying is hard and doing all of that is hard for sure, but I feel like the hardest part about med school has been the mental challenge of it, and your wellness overall, and the sacrifice you're making, and competitiveness, and medical culture, and everyone around us. It gets to you.

Even if you are taking control of everything, like the grades, or the courses, or the rotations, there's still that mental aspect that you do need your community for, at least for me, and you do need that support. That's how you make it through.

Mariam: When I think about these external forces that compel us to pursue these alternative realities, I also think about my pre-med experience. And I don't know about y'all, but I think when you come from this underrepresented community in medicine, or just a marginalized community, a community that's considered oppressed, there's kind of this desire to leave the community and go be successful elsewhere.

I think when I entered into med school, that's when I felt one of the most disconnected times in my life from my family, from my culture. For me, it was all about leaving, and it was about proving myself and being successful on my own and kind of going away from that oppressed stereotype or a lot of the hardship that comes with my community.

Leen: I think there's also an aspect if we were to relate to cultural community, and that's our relation to passion. Of course, just because you belong to a community doesn't mean you 100% identify with everything, right? But then at the same time, I always imagine you still need other forms of community that you might be able to find a way from your own community that help you identify your own personal identity, and thus even push you further in what you need.

I don't like to isolate to one community and say that I belong to one community, because you can absolutely belong to two communities, three communities, more than that, right? Yes, I identify as a Palestinian, but I identify as Palestinian-American.

I always imagine myself, "Man, if my parents didn't come to the U.S., I would have been the village girl." And I don't think I would be who I am today.

Sometimes there are things you're going to disagree on. Of course, you'll find people maybe within the community who agree with you. It's not all homogeneous. But I think that's important to be able to also develop your communities and build them so that you can continue to keep moving with your passion. It might even help you prevent burnout in a sense, right?

Ironically, I think in the Palestinian community, it's the opposite drive of what you experienced, Mariam, where it's more to stay within the community, stay within those rules of the community. And sometimes I feel like success is hindered upon that as well.

But it's so individualized. This topic can be so individualized. It's hard to just say it in a sentence and cover that as a broad term because you can't do that.

Lina: I think it's interesting that there's this kind of thought that's been pushed on all of us that in order to be successful, or in order to find your way, or in order to achieve your dreams or great things, you have to step away from that community, you have to be different, or you have to be like the people who are successful, I guess, in the culture here.

At least for me, I for a while tried those measures and tried to do that. But I then learned that I do need my community and went back to that, and that's what actually uplifted me and gave me power.

There's just a lot of pressure outside, and I think that goes back to the standardized measures that we have to go back to. It's like you have to be a certain way to be successful, and we all go into that.

Hạ: And I think this also really brings it back to the excellent episode that Mariam, Leen, and Harjit did about forms of confidence. I think that a lot of the forces tell us that we have to be a certain type of person and fit a certain type of image. And that image is built from a very specific subset of people that is not who we are. It's very frustrating that those are the forces that often make us go for alternative realities that would otherwise not fit who we are deep inside our soul.

But another thing I wanted to add on is, Leen, when you were talking about all the different communities that we belong to and that shape us, I also sometimes think about the communities that we exist in but that we don't belong into too.

For instance, the medical community. Honestly, it's not built for me, and I don't feel at home with majority of the people in the medical community. But having to navigate that community has also helped me clarify a lot of what I want to be and what I don't want to be.

And so I think it's a very interesting point that, yeah, we take in all the different communities around us, even those that don't accept us, but that we're superficially a part of, and we're shaped from it. It's a very interesting interplay that I didn't quite think about until you brought that up, Leen.

Leen: And sometimes the medical community has the driving culture that, "This is your life. Medicine is your life," and you tend to forget about your other so-called alternative realities that could truly be your own realities, right?

We try to make medicine your only life, and I don't think it should be like that. It should have never been like that. A doctor is a doctor, but again, that's a very isolating idea. Why do we only have to be doctors?

What did I say the other day? I was like, "After residency, I'm going to start focusing a lot more on learning how to sing, music, and all these things."

Alternative realities, they stick in your heart and they make your heart flutter when those moments come, and you realize, "I don't want to miss out on this. You live one life. I don't want to miss out on this." And you've just got to go for it. You can't have that isolate you away from these things.

So I would almost call alternative realities as dreams, and I would say they're dreams with passion. I think if you have that passion, you can drive it forward and do it. Go for it.

Mariam: I think that's really beautifully said. When we think about alternative realities, on the one hand, this is a conversation about who we would have been if we hadn't had each other, found this community. But also, I think when we dream of alternative realities, we can think about who we are outside of medicine as well. We all were people before medicine, before we wanted to go to medical school.

And I think it's really beautiful, Leen, that you said that. When you were talking to us on the group chat about your incredible singing voice . . . She's so incredible and she could be famous if she wanted to. But I think it's really beautiful to be able to invest in something completely outside of medicine, too, and to dream of that "alternative reality" as well.

I told one of my closest friends who got into medical school this. I told her, "You're going to be an incredible doctor, but that's not the best thing that you're going to be. You're going to bring so much to this world outside of just being a doctor. If you think that being a doctor is the most incredible thing you're going to achieve, just you wait and see."

I think we all have to dream outside of that as well and kind of think of our futures outside of medicine to create those lived experiences for ourselves.

Lina: And there are always going to be opinions and assumptions and boxes that society will try to put us in, and there's always going to be push against what you're trying to dream of with medicine, like medicine has to be your whole life. But it doesn't have to be. There are so many things about us. There are so many of our identities that interplay that kind of define us. There are so many dreams within us.

Any dream, any alternate reality, any idea that we have in us, all of our identities, we just have to keep pushing forward with all of those because they all give us strength. They all kind of move us forward, and they all define us, and we just have to keep going with that.

Hạ: Yeah, that was all so beautifully said, y'all. And with that, I feel like that's a great place to wrap up.

To our listeners, I hope that, as always, our discussion about alternative realities has gotten you thinking about your own alternative realities, whether they be good or bad, and also how community has shaped you.

We would always love to hear your thoughts. You can always message us on Instagram.

So, as always, feel free to check us out wherever you get your podcasts. We always love to hear your support and everything. And I hope you all have a happy New Year.

Lina: Yay.

Mariam: Bye.