I was always labelled "gifted" as a child, a word that
isn't used so much now that I'm an adult. I always had a voracious
appetite for learning new things and reading new books. I wanted to
know everything about anything.
As a kid, I read through the college reading lists in middle school,
memorized entire movies and recited them aloud like plays to my
sisters, made up complex kingdoms and worlds in the forms of golden
childhood games, and wrote so many lists regarding history,
linguistics, and science that I was famous for the hundreds of
notebooks stuffed messily beneath my bed. I used to teach my siblings
history classes, I directed and acted in dozens of self-made movies
and comedic radio-style episodes, I wrote my own newspaper, I learned
Japanese well enough to hold basic conversations in 2 months, and I
had written 5 novels before I turned 15.
I still do a lot of these things, smoothed out now into being more
productive, but no less fascinated and curious.
I'm 23 now.
So, what happened to that inquisitive girl? Did I end up going to a
great school and graduating at the top of my class? Traveling the
world? Am I now working at a glamorous, intelligent job? Published a
book or two? Thinking of going to grad school?
Well, no, to any of those things. I didn't end up going to college.
I did a couple semesters at a local college, but I don't consider
that any sort of university experience.
There are reasons that I didn't go, not in the form of beliefs but
rather in the way that my life unfolded. For one thing, I was raised
with the mindset that boys went to college and girls lived with their
parents until they were married and became stay-at-home moms. I knew
that I didn't agree with this, but neverthless, after graduating, I
knew nothing about college. I had never heard of all the words that
people freely tossed about: FAFSA, dean, admissions, freshman,
transcript.
I took the SAT and got a 2220 out of 2400, but I didn't even know
that it was even a good score until a few years later.
I decided which college I wanted to go to, and applied there and
nowhere else. In an interview at the school, I was bewildered by
questions that they asked. Credits? GPA? Honors? What the hell was
this stuff? I must have seemed woefully ignorant.
Nevertheless, I was accepted to my dream school and moved there, but
I didn't know that you had to register for classes (I assumed that
you just showed up, I suppose). There were problems with my financial
aid, and I had not the slightest idea how to sort them out. I missed
a bill to the school – I had the money, but I didn't know how to
get it to them, and I left it too long.
The problems kept building up, and then the lease on my sublet
apartment ended. Impulsively, I packed a few of my things into a
backpack and started walking. I walked until I was in a different
state, and became a wandering street intellectual, doing little
except read and write, filling my journal with idealistic
philosophies and regret over leaving school.
I still desperately miss that school that I never got to attend, but
I no longer regret leaving. I would be a different person if I
hadn't, and I would never have met my longtime boyfriend.
After leaving the school of my dreams, I told myself that I would go
back one day. Eventually, I realized that I never would. I had lost
that school and started a different life in another state.
People ask me why I didn't go to another school, and I can't really
give an answer. I just didn't. In some ways, I think that I felt I
had given away that chance, that too much time had gone by, that I
was too old to go back to school.
I still wrote essays and papers and short stories, studied new
things, and read piles and piles of books each month. But school
largely didn't occur to me.
Awhile ago, I began reading about medicine, offhandedly. I had
always been interested in the human body and medicine (I wasn't
allowed to learn much about it in high school, lending it a more
mysterious quality), but I knew almost nothing about it, and I had
never thought that I'd want to be a doctor.
But while reading some articles on cardiology, something happened.
It was the same something that happened when I learned to read, or
when a friend's mother brought over a stack of books on Ancient
Egypt, when I wrote my first short story, rode a horse for the first
time, read Borges, or was introduced to Cold War Kids. It's
that magical, awestruck feeling that you've found something in the
world to love, that will become a part of you.
I started hunting down more medical articles, even outdated ones. I
was loving them, but I still wasn't thinking of any of it in the
context of school. If someone had, right then, suggested that I
consider medical school, I would have given them a list of reasons
why it wasn't for me.
This was February of 2012, unfortunately. If my interest in medicine
had been sparked a few months earlier, I would most likely have been
in school now. But it didn't, and I was wading through a murky fog of
depression at the time, mourning the loss of someone that I'd loved.
It wasn't until June that something came together. I specifically
remember the day, if not the exact date, when I was reading a medical
article. Unlike the others, this one dealt less with science and more
with personal experience. It was about medical school, and the years
spent training to become a doctor. I was fascinated.
Within seconds, I was looking at the websites of medical schools all
around the country. And I saw myself, years into the future,
attending one of them.
All in a span of perhaps five minutes, my mind was made
up. I announced that night to my boyfriend and my family that I had
decided to go back to university, with the intention of going to
medical school afterward.
A series of setbacks have occurred since then, but I know better now
how to deal with them, and I'm working through them. I haven't even a
fraction of a second thought.
And, for now, that's what I'll write about here – because I am so
very excited.
