What It Means to Fail in Medical School

     

    The first big win in medical school would be the day you see your name on the list of passers. That steady breath of relief and excitement with a little bit of validation that you are meant to be in someplace bigger. Some place where smart people go and thrive, and maybe some place you feel like you belong once and for all. It has been a year since I first saw the news that I got into the only medical school I applied for and the feeling of belonging to something big has always resonated even up to now. I just couldn't forget how victorious I felt that I cried just knowing I can finally take a breath after all the anticipation. 

    The next big memory in medical school will be your first failed exam. Mine was our first quiz in Biochemistry, falling one point short to call it a good day. I called friends to help me shake the idea of failing my whole dream of becoming a doctor, just by failing for one point in my first exam. So much for exaggeration, right? Months later, it felt ridiculous to cry over something so small, in retrospect. Since after one failed exam comes another failure, then comes another, and another until "failure" became meaningless. It doesn't drive you anymore. Somewhere along the way, my mind was able to give failure a new meaning. A definition that doesn't hurt nor question my abilities and my right to be on the road of becoming a healer. 

    However, somehow, along those many failures, it never put me into a kind of discomfort, enough to find myself on my laptop; writing to trace the river that causes the outpour of -what's the word?- shame. I was never sad enough despite every horror story med school gave me until now, when my next biggest breaking point came. 

      "Failures are part of the process. Everyone fails too."

    Until one day in our usual group sessions, I find myself a failure, not by scores, but in comparison to the people I work with. The people I thought I should be at par. Suddenly, my failures were normative. Suddenly, my failures are measured to how well my classmates know something and I just simply cannot comprehend at one point. Suddenly, I find my ego crushed after being corrected by a peer. While all of medical school's horrors happen, a stinging thought reverberated that says, "You are not good enough." Now while this thought crushed a small part me, another pinching voice in my head said, "You are not good enough...for your dream." --This thought, I just cannot rationalize my way out anymore. This time, my four years of Psychology knowledge, have failed to give me a way out of the dark hole. 

    For most of my life in school, I saw myself as one the bests. Engrained in my identity is doing well in school. I exceled, not only in my own way but in the standard of the educational system. Growing up, I believed that one of the biggest measures of greatness is doing better in school. Much more then, when I have no firsthand experience of medical school, I believed that the good doctors are those who did well in exams and amazed doctors in SGDs. It was simple. It was logical. 

    But if I continue to believe in this simple but toxic narrative, I realized I am never going to be a good doctor, right? Not to mention, it was an erroneous conclusion. So of all those years I found myself best, now I found myself humbled. Humbled, as to how easy it is to be shamed for standing there being corrected. How difficult it is to find gratitude somewhere inside this cloud of frustration. 

    I realized how ironic my mindset was. I said I love the idea that I get to belong in someplace big like med school, but now that I am here, I worked in contrast by making it small. Big places mean bigger struggles. So I find myself making conversations in my head over how I should be grateful for the opportunity to know better. Grateful, humbled, and amazed to be in a group of great people - that I get to learn from talented peers! That sometime in this crazy "not good enough" mantra I am trying to unlearn, I get to hear what great people have to say for themselves. I get to hear their brilliant ideas I never thought of. I get to be inspired. I get to know who they are. So in the future, I can tell myself that if these people ended up so successful, I got to witness the moment how they started out too. To me, that counts for something.

    The shattered identity we get from many breaking points in school are all bound to change us. It's our choice what kind of change it's going to be. One year ago, when I saw my name on the list, I would have never thought the way I think now. With that, I thank all of my odds that I get to be a different person. Most of all, I get to belong in my place in my own  weird, sometimes awkward, way.