Resilience — Lisa

The time I dropped out of medical school was one of the lowest moment in my life.  It had happened before.  So I felt like I was in a familiar place.  Something kept telling me I did not belong on this path, but I had kept going.  I had not known what else to do when I had actually dropped out during a semester back when I was pre-med major in my second year of college.

But this time it was worse.  Now I was really in medical school. I had performed poorly on the first set of exams:  Physical Anatomy, Biochemestry, and the third class, I can’t even remember.  It pains me so to think about this episode in my life, the time I dropped out of med school.

No one would work so hard to get here and then do badly.  That’s just what the dean had just told me in our meeting.  “I don’t know how someone who was admitted to med school, could fail so miserably.”  It was a painful meeting.  The dean was sitting in his wood paneled office at his polished mahogony desk.  I was on the other side, trying to appear calm, which I was not.  I didn’t know how to answer him.  I don’t recall that I had an answer.  I just felt ashamed and humiliated.

The truth was that I had not studied at all.  I couldn’t.  I had spent my time wondering what the hell I was doing in medical school.  Such a serious place.  The professors lectured for three hours, then assign something like 300 pages of anatomy to read over night.  I had to go to lab in my white lab coat and watch the professor pull apart a dismembered arm sitting on the dissecting table and turn and rotate the arm to show us each individual muscle.  It smelled like a butcher’s shop, but none of the students seemed to notice.

The pressure was immense.  I didn’t know how I could do the work even if I wasn’t spending my free hours questioning my presence here and feeling out of place with no friends.  Eeryone else was busily doing the work and had no time to listen to a new acquaintance vent her frustrations.  And I was becoming severely depressed.

Yet – thirty some years later, I know I survived.  I didn’t kill myself; I didn’t become a garbage collector, which is what my hysterical mother foresaw for me); I didn’t become a failure.  Even though at that moment I was failing.  And I proceeded the next week to fail out of and drop out of medical school.  I had to pack up my bags and leave my apartment at the medical school campus.  I felt like a complete failure:  the bottomest low I have ever been in my life.

IDEAS for developing:  So far I have only written about the BIG hardship I was facing.  I plan to write more on what strategies I used to pull myself out of this depressive dead end situation.  And more on my journey to where I am now, teaching English at a university.