Yes to immunity!

It’s interesting being an acupuncturist, part of the natural health community and being pro-vaccine.  I see a lot of posts against vaccines on my facebook feed about how harmful vaccines are, and there is nothing that this reminds me so much as conspiracy theories.  It is the one place that the radical left and the radical right overlap, and I find it sad to see as I feel like it undermines the positives that the complementary health world can offer mainstream medicine.

When I thought about how I would engage a friend who happens to be an anti-vaxx-er, what came to me is how fear based that position is.  At first, I was going to poo-pooh that, but then I realized that my pro-vaccine position is also based in fear.  The fear is simply different–I fear the statistical probability of my child being made neurologically different by a vaccine less than I fear the suffering and harm she could come by if she got one of the diseases that she could be immunized for.  Both have the potential to be life long changes made to her development, but she would be unlikely to die from autism as she would be measles or smallpox.  I’ve also read articles written by people with autism who raise the point that they are still people who have the capacity to add to and benefit society (hello Temple Grandin!), and that the fear around it is insulting.  I know that there is a spectrum of autism, and that the more severe it is the harder it is to manage as a person and as a parent.  Yet that argument rests on there being an actual scientific link to vaccines and autism, which there hasn’t been.

 

Brazil

I’m studying for the MCAT at the Northgate Library here in Seattle.  My desk is right at a window that is level to the sidewalk next to a bus stop with pedestrians walking by at a proximity that would be disturbing if not for the window separating us.  Across the street is the mall, with two American flags flying high above the parking lot outside of Macy’s.  I love being in public spaces when I study–it makes me feel more accountable for studying than I feel when I’m alone, but it does have it’s drawbacks.  Since I’m at a library instead of a coffee shop where people have to spend money to be there, there is a wide section of the population here, including a middle aged man who is watching apparently hilarious videos on the computer about five feet away from me.  There is something that is innately very disquieting about someone laughing alone, and the librarian has had to come over and shush him.

With all of these factors in play, an increasing sense of the absurd has come over me.  Kaiser Permanente has apparently taken out an extraordinary amount of ad space on Seattle Metro buses, with large pictures of people in serene nature settings.  Next to the library is a small, for profit hospital.  The complete commercial and public nature my environment along with those ads driving by me on a semi-regular basis is reminding me strongly of the Terry Gilliam movie “Brazil”.  Though nowhere near as surreal, stylized or depressing, something about health insurance agencies marketing to me with a background of the Discount Shoe Warehouse, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Macy’s and Target that reminds me of that universe of commercial capitalism gone amuck.  I’m a diehard believer that everyone deserves quality healthcare no matter their income level, and that it’s being sold like any other consumer good (and likely will be for the foreseeable future).  With so much money being spent on public relations, it’s no wonder our medical system allows people to fall into debt to receive life-saving/life-preserving medical care.  It’s absurd that that happens to people, and that we as a country are ok with that.   Healthcare should be a human right, not a commodity.

back to DNA transcription…

cultural silencing

It’s odd how much you don’t notice things until they’re pointed out.  I was cleaning my study this past Wednesday, fondly looking over the books that have given me my formal education and I did a mental double take.  Really? Have I studied so few female voices after being in school for such a huge chunk of my life?

I had a lot of pretensions when I was younger, and I believed that a proper college education began with the Greek classics.  I excelled at the humanities in high school, so it was a nice excuse to continue studying what came easiest to me.  The first class I registered for at the Evergreen State College wasn’t anything radical, environmental or social justice related, but a 16 credit course on Stoic and Epicurean philosophy.  From there I signed up for a course on Russian literature, another on romantic, premodern and modern philosophy and art, and returned to the classics my final year.  I studied the pre-hellenic and Hellenic philosophers and their Roman elaborators, I read Chekhov, Bulgakov, Goethe, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Sartre and Camus.  I think the entire time I was at Evergreen, I read around four or five books written by women.  And I didn’t notice.

My books from that era are still with me.  I loved studying the humanities–it doesn’t get much better than reading about philosophy and the arts to me.  These men have said vital, beautiful and profound things that have guided European-derived culture for centuries.  But it’s crazy that one gender has had a monopoly on all that for so fucking long.  I read Mary Beard’s self-proclaimed manifesto recently, “Women and Power“, in which an extremely well-educated classics scholar points out how much the classics themselves have served to embed misogyny into our venerated cultural roots.  It’s brief but spot on–and damning.  Right now, in this burgeoning era of productive feminism, you can’t stare at a bookshelf that contains the “must reads” of the past thousand years without confronting the fact that so obscenely few of them are written by women.

Why didn’t I see this before as the travesty I see it as now?   It’s an astonishingly simple answer–I accepted it as the way it was.   It makes me a bit queasy to acknowledge this as a woman who spent high school rocking out to Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Throwing Muses, and PJ Harvey. “Women’s Studies” never crossed my plate as an undergraduate–it seemed too niche, too reactionary, too…angry.  I wanted to study the intellectual foundations of the culture I was a part of, and it took until, well, now, really, to realize how little of a place I had at that historical table as a Mexican-American woman.

Now that I’m in my mid 30s, have a daughter, and am back in school, I bring this hard earned awareness with me, and it drives me nuts.  I hear the girls in my sciences classes say how much easier they understand things when my male classmates explain it to them, I hear it in the confidence my male classmates speak up in groups, where I and other women have a softer, more questioning tone in their voice.  I hear it, and I push back, but I know I’m pushing against something that doesn’t even realize it’s pushing back, not consciously, not all the time.  It’s not really any of our faults, it’s just been the way things are for the past thousand, two thousand or so years–or more.   It’s hard not to be pessimistic, but necessary that we resist.

I’ve lived a far from flawless life, and am not really in a place to be any leader, but I do see it as my duty to be as articulate, well-read and aware as possible.  At my husband’s urging, I wrote Michael Pollan after reading his book about psychedelics and noticed that the history of those substances here in the US are dominated by privileged white men. It seemed odd to me because the experience of psychedelics Pollan documented was cast as being subversive, liberating and empowering–experiences that seems like they would wonderfully benefit women and people of color.   His assistant wrote me a very kind email back, saying she thought it was an important note and that she’d pass it on.  I know he wasn’t being consciously sexist–again, it’s just the way things are and have been until…well, it’s still the way things are, but we’re actively working on it.  That’s why its so important to point these things out, even if they seem obvious, even if they seem shrill and tiresome. Especially if they seem shrill and tiresome.

We’re not post-racial, and we’re not post-gender.  Sometimes you need to state what’s right in front of you and redundant, just so that we start to realize how much we’ve lost out on up to now.  The voices of women and the powerless have been muted for most of our written history.  There is a fall out from this, and we’re just now coming to it.  It’s an exciting and horrifying time to live in, and it will be interesting to see how it’s incorporated into our tragically flawed cultural tapestry.

shifting

I used to want to be a writer.

Ok, I still do.  Like most of us here in the blogosphere.  I like writing, but I’ve never been able to elevate it to more than a hobby, not with any real quality.  I agonize over every word choice, rarely able to find flow except in journaling, and when I step back, I find my voice to have a stilted, slightly pendantic quality.  I’ve never had a blog that’s anything much more than me talking to myself in a public forum, and I’ve never wowed a writing group.  My writing, I feel, has the same quality as my art–reasonably competent, but amateurish, made more for the joy of creation than to sell.  All of which is fine.

A friend of mine has told me a story about reading her letters of recommendation a couple times.  She applied and was accepted at an internship, and while she was working there, she looked at her file.  At the end of one of her letters, all of which was very nice, the professor had written: I don’t know what [she] is doing in the sciences–she’s clearly an artist.”.  Lately, I’ve been wondering if that’s me in reverse.

Since I was little, I’ve fully embraced my inner artist.  Sometimes I get a sensation that’s like the energy of my body welling up in my chest, craving expulsion into something sublime, a work of beauty and transcendence.  It’s not an everyday kind of feeling, but it’s like having an itch you can’t quite scratch–I want to DO something, to create something wonderful, but I’ve never been able to do it justice, and it’s not for lack of trying.

Realizing I want to go full out and become a doctor  has been like a harnessing of that same feeling of creativity.  The structure required in scientific classes has channeled my time and energy in a way that I am nearly incapable of when left to my own devices.  The window that it gives me into the natural world is exciting, and hints at that same feeling of sublime transcendence, which is unexpected but brilliant.  Coming at science from the arts makes me see it as something similar to a paintbrush or a pen–a way of describing the mysteries of the world at large in a way that renders them slightly more understandable.

None of this means I want to quit the arts, to stop writing.  What it does do, however, is make me relax about it.  If my life’s work can be meaningful in a concrete way, if I don’t have to justify myself to myself, then I’m good.   Not that I won’t be fine if I don’t get into medical school, but thinking of myself in those shoes gives me a sense of satisfaction that makes room to let go of the dream of being a latent creative genius.  I can focus on appreciating those who are, and let me pen continue wandering in it’s same awkward way, gabbling at myself in journal form to feel heard in this vast planet full of people.

 

Now, back to chemistry before my daughter wakes up from her nap.  Oops–too late…

 

finding peace with test taking

The end of my first year back to school is almost over, with my chemistry and physics final both happening on Wednesday of next week.  I signed up for a $2350 MCAT test prep course (what a fucking racket, that’s all I have to say about that) for the summer to help me with the August 31st MCAT I registered for to make up for the fact that I’m missing organic and biochemistry for this round of testing.   I’ve resigned myself to this year being my practice year–practice MCAT, practice application, practicing getting my ducks in a row for the real deal next year.  It’s practice because if I can pull this off and get into medical school at some point in the next couple years, the testing has just begun.  Medical school is chock full of high stakes tests, and then you graduate and get to take yet another test.

Thinking of it like this, I’ve starting coming around to a place of acceptance.  I neither do exceptionally well on tests or have an easy time taking them to begin with, but if it’s going to be par for the course, then I may as well start figuring out how to make peace with all of that.  I know the thrill of getting a great test score, and I’ve been holding myself to that bar.  Those test that I did great on were, however, in history and not chemistry nor physics.  And while I want to work my butt off to do well on the MCAT and in all my classes, I don’t want to relentlessly compare myself to others, not so secretly hoping that I did better than them.  I just want to get the scores I need to to pass and assess my understanding.  I know that even as I write this, a part of me will still hold out and press for great test scores.  But, as a coping strategy to lessen the anxiety around test taking itself, I need to let go of that idea that the tests are measuring me and how smart I am, and start regarding them as a tool for addressing the gaps in my knowledge and leave it at that.

So here’s to passing these upcoming tests and making reasonable, but not perfect, grades in both classes.  I’ve had my brush with 4.0 student-dom, and think my time has passed.  I’ve proved to myself that I can do it, but now I just hope to get good-enough grades to keep that 3.8 I left off with my last round of classes.  At a certain point, you have to start finding a balance between the stress of aiming for perfection, and turning it down a notch so that life becomes enjoyable again.  Quality of life matters, even if you’re going down the med school track.

I sure hope this strategy pans out for me…I know some anxiety is good as it keeps you reaching, but if (knock on wood) this all pans out for me, I just don’t want the next 10 years to be consumed by it.  Just doesn’t seem healthy–physically, psychologically, or emotionally.  We’ll see, I guess.

the perils of following your bliss

Somewhere, it got into my head that I should “follow my bliss”, do whatever makes me happy in regards to my career, my life.  My highly educated, middle class parents, while not directly espousing this advice, encouraged this kind of thinking, with a few points of practicality thrown in that tended to miss their mark.   My dream in high school was to go to Sarah Lawrence College and study creative writing and religion, and though I was waitlisted there, I didn’t make the cut.  I realize now that the thing is that Joseph Campbell, that quasi-mystical, generalist of comparative religion who first coined that term and was my first guru, was in the perfect place to say that, coming from an upper middle class background himself–a former track star and world renowned author and lecturer at that prestigious liberal arts college.  Supported brilliance has a way of not taking into consideration the support part, especially if you manage to become a rock star in your field.

I’ve always had the luxury of a safety net, a place to go or a person to call if things didn’t work out.  I’m privileged.  Not as much as some, but not as little as others. My mother dedicated her life to her career to fulfill the aspiration of becoming upper middle class.  Her parents, first generation Mexican-Americans had gotten a college education and firmly seated themselves in the middle class.  My mother wanted more, and wanted to give her daughter–me–more too.  So I’ve spent the last 35 years fumbling around with my career, “following my bliss”, only recently figuring out that unless you’re very very lucky or a genius, following your bliss doesn’t mean making money.  And money, that root of all evil, that bringer of luxury, that thing that I’ve never made a goal of in my life to earn, isn’t just that.  It’s the ability to take care of your parents when they get old, it’s security for retirement, it’s your child’s future.

Now, being a mom myself trying to get into medical school, my motivation shifts and changes, sloshing around the wine of a drunk person stumbling across a room.  What launched me was feeling like this was a calling, and realizing that unless I’m lucky, acupuncture wasn’t ever going to allow me to make enough money for my husband to work less.  What sustains me is morphing from a quasi romantic dream of being a doctor to the hard reality that I know I’m smart enough to make it through medical school and be a good doctor, and that that will both allow me a good retirement and to take financial care of the people I love when they need support as they get older.  Both my husband and I are only children, and our daughter is likely going to be an only child–there’s nobody else to take care of us or them.  My husband’s parents have never had jobs with retirement plans and 401ks, and same with the aunt who helped raise me.  My mother has worked a government job most of her career and so is taken care of, but she likes to live a comfortable life, and I want to give that to her since she worked so hard to give that to me.  We’re not economic islands, though we like to pretend otherwise here in the United States.

I’ve spent a school year now with my nose in the books, working as hard as I can to get good grades.  I’m tired, but I have a toddler and am signed up both to take chemistry during the summer and the MCAT.  I’m too old to take a breather.  If I can make this happen for myself, the workload isn’t going to abate for foreseeable future.   The slacker mentality I had in grade school and college no longer has any room in the life I’m crafting for myself.  It’s interesting being at a community college, surrounded by people from so many different backgrounds, all trying to take firm steps up the economic ladder.  Ironically, I sit next to a Sarah Lawrence College alumni in my chemistry class who almost seems to hold a grudge against his liberal arts degree–he simultaneously feels like he squandered a world class education and that it was a waste of time, financially speaking.  I still love my liberal arts degree from the Evergreen State College, but I’ve departed from feeling like $30,000/year is enough.  Maybe it was when it was just me, but we’re all so much more than just us–we’re networks of people, and though it’s nice to think we should all follow our bliss, but it’s important to plan for helping to take care of the network too.  Some cultures need no reminder of this, but this current generation reaching their 40s-mid-20s–GenX, Y, or millennials–whatever you call us–here in the US, we need to put our bliss on the shelf and remember that what it comes down to is hard work and savvy choices.

maintaining inspiration

Wanting to go to medical school is such a huge endeavor for someone with a family, and requires so much work and small moments of sacrifice that I often hit moments when what I need is a hit of inspiration.   Sometimes, when it’s easy, the sheer joy of learning does it.  I find chemistry fascinating, and if I’m well rested and feeling on top of it, I get my dose from chemistry class and the lectures my teacher delivers.  She’s wonderful at distilling the information presented in the textbook at making it easy to understand, and for me, that moment of understanding is slightly thrilling.  I love it, and it’s one of the reasons I decided to go for the gusto and try to get into medical school, because if I love learning so much, why not?

If chemistry builds me up with clarity and purpose, physics wipes it all out.  I’ve had nothing but new teachers for physics who lack that ease of explanation and haven’t learned how to address multiple learning styles.  I often leave physics feeling utterly deflated and slow.  And on weekends, when I try to put in at least 8 hours of studying both days, I end up hitting a wall.  I know I have so much more work to put in if I’m going to get my understanding where I want it to be, but oh man…

Sometimes a well timed affirmation can help, if I remember to do it, and sometimes I need more.  As an inspiration junkie, I’m picky.  No chicken soup for the soul or one line quotations, I need more than that.  For that reason alone it took me years to find a spiritual community, because for me, the principle reason to be a part of one are the sermons. ( That, and not being Christian.  But that’s another story.)  The ministers at University Unitarian Church have that quality for me, when they’re on their game, and I’m so glad to have found that resource.  But church isn’t every day, and I can’t go every Sunday.  So where do I find inspiration hits?

TED talks are a good resource, as are multiple other NPR programs. The Great British Baking Show is another one for me, because the lesson you find within that show is that if you have a crappy day and fail at your undertaking, well, tomorrow is another day and it’s totally possible to learn from your mistakes and pull it together enough to keep going on.  Love love love seeing that, and watching people bake to boot.  It was wonderful, soul-nourishing to watch Bishop Michael Curry’s sermon at the royal wedding this weekend, and I should be so lucky to keep that spirit in me as I face this coming week.

Still, I have 10 more years of this, if I get in, and there will be some rougher patches to pull through than anything I’ve hit yet.  Which is why, unfortunately or fortunately, it always comes back to the self.  No one else can ultimately come and lift you up if you’re not open to it, and being open to it is trickier than it seems.  When you’re feeling low, and like your task ahead is monumental, its natural to want to collapse inward instead of reaching out, seeing the difficulties as barriers instead of challenges.  In the end, it’s up to us if we’re going to listen to those words of encouragement, or allow ourselves to feel that love that exists out there in the universe as one of humanity’s spiritual redeemers.   Whenever I hit low patches, and am likely to see the negative more than the positive, it always comes back to that.  It’s the fundamental truth I come back to in my life–compassion, love, respect, listening.  If I’m wandering away from those values, I’m not being the best I can be, and I need to take a moment to regroup.  And so…

The science classroom and women

I like chemistry, and I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of really good chemistry teachers.  This past year, if I ever struggle with the reading, I don’t worry about it because I know that the teacher will explain it in a way that I understand.  I would take this for granted, but it has not been the same case this year in physics.  This is why I found it somewhat funny and frustrating today when I overheard a female classmate of mine talking to a male classmate, saying she just didn’t get it, then after he explained it, suddenly it all became illuminated to her.

Now. I’m not oblivious to any possible aims of the lady, nor do I fault her if she is indeed interested in this guy romantically.  He’s a class friend of mine, and she could do worse.  What made me want to roll my eyes and give her a talking to was that this is a woman who rides her bike to class, has this feminist patch:

sewn on her bike messenger bag, tattoos, and plugs in her ears.  Earlier this quarter when I was completely frustrated with the class dynamics and the men of the class totally dominated the discussion, I approached her to ask what she thought, hoping to share my indignation about the absence of women’s voices in the daily class conversation.  She saw nothing wrong with the class dynamics, she said, she liked them, and when I tried to explain myself, things only got increasingly awkward.  I don’t really hold this against here–I was too angry to be articulate, and I totally understand if I just seemed like a weirdo to her.  But since then, hearing her talk loudly about how she hopes that there isn’t math on the exam, how she doesn’t get it, and other such incidences…well…

It’s never been a belief of mine that we should pretend that we’re good at something we’re not, and I totally understand being lost in a science class and have empathy for her.   She has the total right to be her, and that should include all of the above without exception.  I still succumb to complete and utter anxiety when I get lost in a mathematics lecture in my physics class and avoid pure math classes like I hope to avoid getting another root canal.  But thing is, we live in a society that it so completely gender biased that women don’t even noticed that their voices are almost silent in certain classes.  I don’t know what we have to do to begin fixing these unconscious biases and stereotypes,  but loudly proclaiming our ignorance in a highly competitive classroom doesn’t help.

The other thing that bothered me witnessing this scene is realizing that these boys who dominate the classroom get these little boosts from their peers, looking to them as authorities, and regarding them with obvious respect.  I do very well in that class, am quick to understand, and speak up often, getting things right as often as those boys, but I very rarely treated as such.  I’m not looking for it, and even thought I’m writing about it in relation to myself, I can honestly say that I don’t really want it (I’ve seen myself when I get cocky, and I don’t like it), but it’s striking that it’s something that happens so easily to these guys and not to the women who are on their same level.

Last quarter in a group quiz, I got all the answers.  I had busted my ass studying enthalpy reactions the day before, and really knew my stuff for that chapter.  When one of the other guys in the group wasn’t getting them correct, I tried to explain.  He dismissed me, and looked to the the Asian guy sitting next to me to get the right answer.  The guy had a similar answer to mine, but he had his signs wrong, so I pointed it out.  I was right and knew I was right, but he then had to check with a friend of his in a separate group before believing that I was indeed right.   At the end of the quiz, the first guy who didn’t believe me, said sorry to me with his eyes on the ground.  I didn’t ask him to, and I don’t think I came across as mad, but I think the whole thing was too obvious for him not to.

That incident stuck with me, as did the one where I realized that the most outspoken and smartest sounding guy in the room also got things wrong and had no problem lifting my explanations from me when they sounded intelligent enough and passing them off as his own.   I don’t mean to sound too righteous or like I’m just complaining, because the thing is that this is big–it’s what happens to so many women in STEM classrooms.  It happens to women when they’re young and don’t have the confidence that I do as an older, married and secure woman, and it gets internalized.  They see their right answers dismissed and stolen, they’re not treated as authorities, and they see the attention granted to the best students of the class go to their male peers, even if they’re understanding is just as good.  Unless you’re rock solid in yourself and your knowledge, knowing that you too have your place in this classroom, it’s easy to see why so many women start to feel like maybe they’re not as good at math or science as their male counterparts.

And so, I carry on busting my ass studying, raising my hand, speaking up, and challenging the guy who is perceived as the smartest in the class when he’s wrong, part for myself and my grade, and to keep a consistent female voice at the table in that classroom as a competitive figure.  Even if I get it wrong sometimes, even when I’m tired and don’t feel like it, even if it makes people not like me, and even if I don’t get recognized for being as good a student in class as I am.  Because what else can I do about it but that?

The Problem with Good Grades

At some point every quarter, I end up giving myself permission not to get perfect grades.  The pressure I put on myself to achieve them is so great that it feels unhealthy, and so I tell myself that it’s ok if I don’t get them.  But then I wind up torn, unable to stop trying my hardest, knowing how disappointed I’ll be in myself if I get even an A- in the course, previously a perfectly acceptable grade to me.

Close on the heels of this permission giving by myself to myself comes the feeling of the sheer impossibility of getting those perfect grades, the hyperawareness of my own shortcomings as a student. Once a quarter in physics I’ve had a mini-meltdown when I face the hard truth that even with all the time I’ve put into studying, I’m still simply not that good physics, and will have to limp through the rest of the quarter painfully, the weak link in my lab group.  My classmates start to look at me with pity, and begin to act as if I’m not that bright–a bitter pill for a person who has always regarded themselves as smart.

A sign from the universe like I’d been hoping came to me last week in the form of one of the schools guidance counselors.  I went there to talk to her about possible other trajectories so that I can help my husband support us economically sooner than if I were to go to medical school, or if I don’t get in.  But when I told her that I’ve managed to get a 4.0 GPA since I’ve come back to school this time, she stopped me there and told me that I’m likely underestimating myself.   She then showed me the median salary of a primary care physician in the Seattle area, and said I could look at other schooling if I wanted, but she thinks my odds are good and that it’s a good choice for me.

Unfortunately, good grades are earned, and each quarter you start anew.  Talking to other students doesn’t ease any anxieties. One classmate I talked to about how getting better grades only seems to make the stakes higher said that, yes, it’s true.  Admissions committees are looking for upward trends, not slumps.  I have nowhere to go but down, unfortunately, so even a 3.9 is a bad grade for me now.  Another classmate who dropped my physics class the first week told me that dental and medical schools look down on community colleges, and advised taking courses at the University of Washington. Thinking about the class size and tuition cost increases, there is little incentive to transfer seeing as how I already have my bachelors, but it makes me feel again like there’s little room for my grades to dip.

I know this is a good problem to have all in all, but it hasn’t gotten easier as the quarters have ticked by.  I’m old enough to see how things can ebb and flow, and I don’t find it good practice to rest on any previous accomplishments too complacently.   We’ll see how I do this quarter, but I don’t think I care to put any expectations on myself.

Women and Confidence

I’ve never liked to represent myself as other than I am. If I’m unsure about something, I don’t like to hide it.  For me, the advice “fake it til you make it” is b.s.  Being genuine is something I’ve always prided myself on–I can’t stand it when people are fake, so I thought it was something akin to virtuous to not assume confidence I didn’t earn.  The thing is a lot of women do this to themselves, and it holds all of us back.

This quarter for my physics class, I put together a presentation on gender bias in STEM classrooms.  The research is damning–sexism follows women all the way up from grade school, becoming particularly vicious in upper-division science classrooms.   The thing that I zeroed in on as the key factor is the confidence that men display versus women.  I see it in the classroom all the time.  Women speak their answers as questions, qualify their statements with “I’m not sure, but…”, occasionally even giggling at themselves.  Men are confident from beginning to end–how they sit in their chair, raise their hand, speak their answer.  It’s devastating to watch, because it’s this dynamic that flushes women out of competitive fields just as it does STEM classrooms.  Then I read this article in the Atlantic, confirming what I had found in my own research.

As disheartening as it is to see it proven how alive and well sexism, it’s starting to change me.   I already didn’t have much of a problem participating in class.  When I started taking classes at the beginning of the year, I was worried about talking to much and not leaving room for others to learn and speak up.   The thing is, if I silence myself out of consideration for others, the outspoken guys will do no such thing–it simply allows them more room to dominate the class.  Now, I make it my duty to participate if women remain quiet.  In my chemistry class this quarter, I’m the only woman who regularly speaks up so far.  Maybe it makes me annoying to some, but I don’t care.  Unless other ladies are willing to step up, I’m not going to let the same 3 men who sound like they know it all already (and don’t really–the biggest know-it-all in my class helped our group get the wrong answer on a quiz, and didn’t even bother apologizing to us.  Oh to have the confidence of a man).

I’d been doing the same thing to myself as I began pulling myself together to get ready for the MCAT and this years’ application to medical school.  I’ve been moping around that it’s a long shot, questioning my ability to get in, thinking I’m delusional for even trying, and wondering if I’m too old.  In my chemistry class, as we went around in a circle and said our names, I went first and said I was hoping to go to medical school.  Then later down the line, a man who was clearly older than I was said in supremely confident tones that he’s going to medical school to study psychiatry.  He hadn’t gotten in yet, but the confidence in his voice was robust enough to make anyone believe he could.  I kicked myself for sounding unsure, because what I’m realizing is that it’s that very unsure-ness, that talking myself down that was making it a long shot.

The thing is, I feel I was right for my disdain for faking it til you make it.  People are good bullshit detectors, but they can’t detect bullshit if you believe it yourself.  Look at our president, the epitome of a confidence man.   He lies all the time, but believes it himself and so people believe in him.  While that model doesn’t work for me, the place that I’ve found true confidence to be is realizing that I can indeed do something.  That belief isn’t based on faulty logic, and it’s not lying to myself or anyone else.  When I signed up for physics back in the fall, I thought it was going to wipe me out of the game right out of the gate.  I spent the entire quarter feeling like I was going to fail, but I worked my ass off in an effort to understand even when I wanted to give up in hopelessness.  My husband, who has some misgivings about me going to medical school, wasn’t reassured when I told him I probably wasn’t going to get good enough grades in physics to allow me into medical school.  He told me he wasn’t worried because he thought I couldn’t do it, but because he thought I could, and then he’d be married to a medical school student, which he knows will be stressful.  Then I got a 4.0.  The next quarter, I couldn’t see myself getting another set of 4.0s.  Just couldn’t, not with going on a trip to Hawaii and taking a crazy hard accelerated hybrid chemistry class on top of physics.  It was going to be a slump, and I’d be getting a 3.5 maximum.  But it happened again; I got a perfect GPA for the quarter.

Now, despite all the talking down I could do to myself, all the faults I could find, I can’t help but start to believe that I can do it.  I can pull this off–I simply can’t afford not to believe that.  I don’t want to doubt myself into failure, I want to believe in myself to success.  At this point in my life, I trust that I’m a reflective enough person to take heed when I overstep myself, and learn from my mistakes.  I know the utter necessity of having compassion and respect for my fellow beings, and that belief is central to how I live my life.  As long as I’m resting on that and striving to live up to that as best I can in my interactions with people, then I can also put some of the self-doubt I’ve been lugging around with me for regulation aside.  I want to dare to be excellent, and have the confidence to believe I can do it.  Yes, I’m going to mistakes, but I can’t let them define me.

So yes, it’d be nice to have more time to prep for the MCAT this August, but right now, I’m just going to start believing I can do it.