I Love How Grades Don't Define Us, But Getting A Bad Grade Still Makes Me Feel So Much Like A Failure

Think of your brain as a computer. You have the power to program whatever the f*ck you want into your subconscious and watch it manifest in your day-to-day life.

Healthier body.

Healthier skin.

Healthier hair.

Healthier mindset.

Healthier relationships.

Healthier friendships.

Healthier routines.

Healthier habits.

Healthier life.

As a girl or woman, raise yourself to be an intellectual. Raise yourself to be a reader, a traveller, a curious explorer. Raise girls who are independent livers and thinkers, who are critical of standard narratives and status quos and societal and religious dogma. Girls and women will never benefit from being naïve, stuck in one place, unaware, ignorant, out of options, close minded etc besides deriving from these states a false sense of safety, but the patriarchy reaps massive profits from afflicting these conditions.

'God's Idea' by Da Loria Norman, 1931.

Someone said “ I don’t walk away to teach people a lesson I walk away when I’ve learned mine” and I felt that.

Today, we were supposed to learn about clinical presentations of hematologic disorders. The teacher came in, looked at us and told us he was not going to teach that. We were really confused until he opened a slide labelled clinical reasoning. He then explained that as 4th year medical students 7th week into our internal medicine attachment, we were not ecxpected to know a lot.

"Just the principles," he said. He also told us the feeling of inadequecy and lack of knowledge we feel when our peers answered a question we were struggling to grasp or find the answers for was completely normal. "It's because they read a section you haven't read, there might be sections you read they haven't. Think of it that way."

The fact that he said that quelled my imposter syndome just a little. I felt as if I knew nothing when my classmates answered real head-scratcher questions on bedsides, rounds and classes. And that feeling had affected my study sessions because they made me feel it wouldn't bring any change in my knowledge and I wasn't smart enough for medical school. Maybe these things were also felt by them no matter how much I thought they were confident in their knowledge.

Anyways, he taught us how to take history, do a focused physical examination and form our diagnosis based on the pertinent information from that.

I only wish that we learned this at the start of the attachment because it would've been a great help back then.

shoutout to every neurodivergent adult who has never been on a date and grew up with very few friends, believing over time that a lack of a social circle meant they must be fundamentally broken and unloveable as they watched everyone else hit social milestones like partying and dating before them

you’re still cool and lovable and a legit adult even if you’re “behind” by NT standards

I had a professor in college who used to start solving every problem with the same dialogue.

Proff: What’s the first step to solving any problem? Class: Don’t panic. Proff: And why is that? Class: Because we know more than we think we do.

I think about that a lot tbh. It didn’t occur to me until much later that he meant for us to apply that dialogue outside of the classroom to any problem. Because we always know more than we think we do. We are all an amalgam of random information that ends up being relevant with surprising frequency.

i’d do anything for me. i love me.

That “loss” was a blessing in disguise.