Dissociation

Salaam,

Dissociation. It's a funny looking word when you stare at it almost immediately. It's that feeling one gets when they've sacrificed themselves entirely to something or someone not themselves and have little self left for his or herself at the end. It's the feeling I used to get after long days as a third year medical student, caring for patients, trying to figure out what was expected of me and comply with that, living for compassion and living for a grade.

I hadn't had that feeling in residency so much until this last night shift. I woke up, tossing and turning, unable to sleep more than three hours after the last shift in which I was absolutely exhausted. I keep thinking about the last patient we admitted. I keep thinking about the family meetings, his grandchildren sprawled out on the floor crying, running out of the room intermittently, bowing their heads, trying to understand, in an instance, death that they apparently did not see looming.

I was tempted to log into the computer to see if he's still alive. If I keep thinking about him, I'll have to. He may not be. I wish I could close the loop with the family and debrief. I wish I could be there, in spite of my lack of sleep.

I couldn't turn in my bed but for dreaming I was in the hospital. So I just had to sit up. And purposeless tears flowed down my face. I did not start them nor stop them. They came on their own.

I think I'm tired, too. Last night, I started losing my sense of self. I felt isolated, I felt apart, I felt different. I feel alien. I feel like I'm different from everyone else. I feel like no one can relate to me, not my classmates, not anyone in my program, not my SO. I felt alien in the music that I like, my sensibilities, the way I dress, the way I think, the way I am.

I think it's all happening because last night was a rough night, I put too much of myself into that family meeting, that patient encounter, gently touching the man who may be dying and speaking to him softly so he wouldn't feel discouraged as his granddaughter, not understanding the gravity of his illness, told me how his legs had been becoming cold before he was admitted. It was hard and I had to be strong. It was hard when I had to be strong because I'm in this position right now because I was inappropriately weak. I can't be weak now.

I think it's all happening because I'm also in transition, a transition that's been long in coming. A transition in my faith, a transition that is not complete but that will be long. I've lost elements of my life that used to give it meaning. My life still has meaning, of course, but in some ways it's so different I barely recognize myself.

I'm in the same in the mirror, and that I'm so the same in the mirror despite how different I sometimes feel inside feels incongruent.

It doesn't make sense that I look the same. I should look different.

I feel like dropping off the face of the earth. Not really. I feel like disappearing for sometime, into myself, away from everyone else, like I used to have the luxury to, to listen to the music that I like that no one else cares for, to dance my samba in peace. I feel like taking long walks alone, reflecting alone, being by myself. I feel like being present only in a professional sense.

And now the tears are purposeful.

Sometime in the course of last night, I completed a turn of dissociation.

I can't be someone I'm not, and I can't play like every way that I've changed since I've started this residency isn't a big deal.

Good Enough

Salaam,

I once had a professor in medical school named Dr. Goodenough. He was more than good enough. He was integral in some way I cannot remember in either the Civil Rights Movement itself or was vocal in advocating for underrepresented minority students at the medical school. Either way, he was an excellent educator, investigator and physician.

Apart from the cool name, I've always taken good enough, in the description of people, as a partial slur. Kind of like Mr. Zuckerman's "That'll do, pig. That'll do." It felt like settling. It felt like my mom saying, "I'd rather you get Cs and be happy."

No, that was not acceptable. I scoffed at that. Daddy understood. Even the A minuses from AP courses that therefore counted as As didn't feel quite right. No. Good enough is too easy. I took that from school and placed into my spiritual life, and being human was too easy. Just being was too easy. In order to strive in the way of God, I should have always striven to be better. We are imperfect but I should always strive to be perfect.

As I put it in a previous entry, I am striving for impossible. And if you are striving for impossible, won't you always be flustered?

Imagine how hard it was for me, a self-proclaimed perfectionist, to read Brené Brown's Daring Greatly. Imagine how much harder it was for me to read that not only is perfectionism a shield from vulnerability, but that it is destructive. It's not striving for success or challenge or excellence, it's striving to be liked and accepted.

I have spent much of my childhood and adult life slinking through the path of least resistance, trying to find the way to be to be most liked by those around me or, even better, to be the most liked by the people I would potentially meet. I took politeness to be, how can I mold myself to be the most pleasant to passersby? And then I amplified it and carried it with me through the rest of life.

How could I be to be most loved by a man? How could I be to be the most loved by both of my parents simultaneously? Who could I bring home who would make not only my parents reasonably happy, but also fit into my large and crazy extended family? Good enough...oh no, not good enough for my loved ones.

But what about good enough for me?

I was never enough for me. There was always something deficient. Spirituality was no longer a haven, it was a prison that I couldn't leave until I was good enough. And I was never good enough. And good enough wasn't good enough, it had to be near perfect. It never occurred to me that here and now could ever be good enough.

And because I wouldn't let myself be good enough, no one was good enough for me.

Not that I now believe in settling, because it's not the same. It's just that when you're more content with where you are in the moment, you are more apt to see people in the moment, than try to project your future self to line up with a current man who would fit well with your ideal self that you hope to attain in the next year, but not with you.

When I let my now be good enough, I allowed myself to see who I actually am and what is currently important to me. It feels brazenly wordly and I'm still struggling with the concept. But good enough, am I good enough?

I'm more than good enough, by God's grace.

Finish Line

As salaam alaikum,

A year ago from Monday, I was sitting in front of my classmate and former roomie's apartment building, watching runners cross St. Paul Street on Beacon while sitting on her ottoman. She swiveled next to me in her office chair. We weren't running but at least I was dripping in sweat. At the heat of the day, it was 91 degrees, and after a few hours, the sun was just so the shadow of the building behind us receded and no longer sheltered us.

I looked at the white sitting on the median with their bare legs reflecting the sunlight and wondered if their skin hurt like mine did from the direct sun. It was April and already I was getting bronze. I broke out a spaghetti string blouse that now smelled like sweaty me and probably wasn't that cute.

But it was a great day! We got there early enough to see who would likely be the winners of the marathon, the finish line less than a mile away. We saw everyone who was in it for the run, probably people who'd run it every year. I shouted "Braseeoow!" every time I saw a runner from Brasil, hoping they'd hear me. And I cheered for several groups of runners as they made their way steadily, as I saw people slow to a walk, drink water.

But honestly, I don't remember it all. I remember it was a hot day and after a while we took the office chair and ottoman back into her apartment and went somewhere to eat. Five years living in Boston and I finally had a real day off to go to the marathon that several classmates ran every year.

Monday was my brother's birthday, tax day, Patriot's Day, Marathon Day. I had friends from Boston and not from Boston running the marathon. I planned to wake up from being post call to maybe glance at who won this year, as I did last year, and recall fondly that hot spring day foreshadowing a hot summer in the city that I lived in for five years.

Instead, I woke up to a text from my mother, asking me if I had heard about the marathon bombings.

It's different when you see such chaos at a familiar site.

It happened a block from where I used to get acupuncture, a place I've walked many a day and night and felt completely secure. The thing that got me about the image of the first explosion were the flags from all of the different countries that whipped in the wind after that with the backdrop of terrified screams. It made me cry the first time.

I would never, ever expect such a thing to happen during the marathon.

Fast forward these few days, lives changed, bodies mangled, the false accusations, the brown men framed, the hate crimes, the murdered MIT police officer outside of the window were a former classmate worked, the explosives out of the SUV, the city on lock down.

I don't know what to say.

And I really don't have anything more to say than what has already been said in other blogs. Scratch that. I have less to say.

I pray for everyone affected, and insha'Allah I'll pray some more. Not only my friends and virtual fam in residency in Boston, but for everyone. I came of age in Boston. I became a doctor in Boston. I had a lot of firsts in Boston and made family in Boston. I'm all the way on the other coast and had tucked it away as a past phase in my life but I find myself wanting to call it my city. It hurt my heart to see my city without the T running, with no one at Downtown Crossing, with no one in the financial district...

That terrorists are again Muslim feels to me like all the time criminals are again black. Condemn and distance is the way to go, I feel. These days I'm not feeling like too much of an apologist. All I can say is, the reality of these people, whatever crazy thing it is, is so distant from my reality, so distant from where I was last year on a hot spring's day, sun painfully bronzing my shoulders as the runners, swift, lean and agile, dripped sweat on Beacon as they ran to the finish line.

Voracious

As salaam alaikum,

For some reason in my late 20s...or, let me be real, like, now...I've become a voracious reader. I don't know what spurred the change. I went from coming home after a long day at the hospital and wanting nothing more than watching a couple of episodes of Daily Show or Colbert report or whatever random show that I follow on the internet, and then I'd go to sleep blissfully unaware of the world around me.

I think sometime between fourth year and the start of residency, I started reading more.

From the likes of The Atlantic and The New Yorker to just plain news stories. From sites like AltMuslimah to CurlyNikki. From my favorite bloggers to articles about my favorite authors. From best-sellers and their books status post successful TED talks to books I heard about years ago and am just now getting to.

I'm currently reading three or four books at a time right now...slowly because my current schedule affords me about three hours between work and sleep to eat, bathe, catch up with family, friends and SO...and read.

But in addition to those three or four books (and another that's pre-ordered for my Kindle, just waiting for me to tear into it), I have several tabs open with articles and stories I want to read that I will get to, insha'Allah, just given enough time.

Just like I was "a girl too late" at 19 when I fell in love with MTQ, I'm a sudden voracious reader. And I never have been, perhaps paradoxically.


I've heard all my life that good writers must, as a rule and perhaps by second nature, read a ton. Like, really, read everything they get their hands on...and like it. My mother is a great writer and she was a voracious reader until the stresses of being Sandwich Generation caught up with her and both have simmered into almost nothing. But she was my inspiration. I wanted to be like her.

I was an early reader and by age group a strong reader but I was not the strongest reader. My mother read aloud with me and helped me with some of the things I struggled with. I would often miss words that were critical to comprehension of the sentence, sometimes because I was rushing. I specifically remember thinking it was a big deal to be able to read several sentences, maybe even a paragraph, without mistakenly mispronouncing a word or stumbling in the sentence. In fact, I don't think this was a skill I truly obtained until after college, after poor and informal speech training. I remember feeling such satisfaction at being able to read without "messing up."

And I'm one of those people who, for years, read aloud in my head. I did so in both English and Spanish. Somewhere between medical school and now, I no longer do that. It's so weird that I hardly remember what it was like to read aloud in my head. I think I still do sometimes, especially when I'm the one who's writing. But I think years of being a medical student and frantically more-than-skimming articles in a short time where I was expected to know the answer in a detailed enough way but get this information in a limited time did the trick, and shifted into my pleasure reading as well.

But on top of all of these things...I don't know, I never got the pleasure of reading that my mother described. She talked about hiding herself in her 12-person, 2 bedroom household and reading anything and everything she could get her hands on. Because of my mother, I read The Secret Garden and A Wrinkle in Time. On my own, as a 10-year-old, I read Roots. I read the Jurrasic Park trilogy with much gusto after having seen the movies, opining that the books were better, but by the time I was 12, I was writing maybe three or four stories at a time, and reading mainly what was required for school.

I didn't rush home to read my latest find from the library or get excited about books that I wanted to read next. I got very excited about characters I wanted to come to life, stories I wanted to put on paper, scenes that I laughed about in my head for days that were even greater than...once I got them on paper.

But a good writer must read a lot, or at least sufficiently to be a good writer.

I didn't want all of those story ideas and characters to go to crap because I was a bad writer because I didn't read enough.

And honestly, that's what drove me to read from high school until I'd say the end of medical school. I never really read something because it was interesting...it was more because I should. That classic that we didn't get to in my high school Humanities course? Must read. That new book by that black author that has crossover appeal? Must read. Things Fall Apart. Not only have you not been to Nigeria ever but it took you how long to read that?

And so on.

So it surprises me to be quite satisfied with not starting a new writing project and having three books that I want to read, a little heavier on the non-fiction than the fiction.

What happened?

I'm changing.



That's right, I'm changing. I'm becoming no longer the person I used to be. I think it's called growth.

I'm expanding. My world has been branching out and tending toward entropy and I'm all spread out now. I'm no longer running to catch up with should and I finally am. When you're no longer chasing should and just are, you have more time to observe the world around you. I'm more curious. I'm more inquisitive. I'm more wanting to understand things that I left behind because I didn't have time to learn about it, was on to the next thing, no one asked so I didn't reveal that I didn't know.

That's happening to me in medicine. I'm going back and reading and understanding things I've only marginally understood for too long, in part because I realize that I'll need to know it at critical points when no one will be there to explain it. It's also because of actual interest, knowing that I'll face similar situations someday and being more confident in my own mental reserves.

Similarly, on the outside, in my everyday life, I've have allowed myself to be long enough to want to know more about everything. And while I blame some of my lack of reading for being born in front of a television, essentially, and half of my childhood memories being television shows, and half of my story ideas being inspired by television and movies...I find myself seeking information. Non-fiction...I wanted to learn more about The Great Migration, more about the female sexual experience, more about resilience training for physicians. More about education for kiddos with special needs and not leaving these kids behind. More about discipline and children in the 21st century. More about the origins of Islamic Jurisprudence. More about writing novels.

I find myself searching for stories. Not because I should, but because...sometimes there's no better way to learn about and identify with love than reading a fiction piece. Learn what it means for someone else to be a black women though their fiction. Learn about aspirations and predilections...through fiction.

The more I've lived, I think, and the more I allow myself to live now instead of chasing should, my interests expand beyond should and the more I seek. The more I read.

Because while documentaries I argue are still ideal for the likes of music genres, record labels and recording artists, there's so much more that can be said about slavery and non-existent reconstruction, about race in Latin America...than can fit into a documentary. In that case, I don't need a soundtrack. I'm there with a book.



...granted, the writer in me rarely lets me read a book for more than 10 pages before I'm compelled to write a 10 page reflection of my own about one sentence, sometimes one word that's said. When I was a college student, this would happen all the time. I got the reading done, always, but...I've always been a slower reader...

And maybe I still read slow. But I'm no longer concerned that I should read fast.

And here I am.

...I'm also rereading RMD and enjoying it. Insha'Allah, I'm going to edit it one more time and send it out...one of these days.

Want

As salaam alaikum,

I once wanted something for myself, but then I'm pretty sure I gave up because I was convinced that it does not exist. I still believe that it does not exist. Or do I?

I don't think I believe that it doesn't exist anymore. It's just that, after wanting it so much, convincing myself that it was perfect for me...I realized that I didn't want it once I convinced myself that it didn't exist.

And now it exists again, and I don't want it.

This wouldn't be a problem if I hardly knew who I was anymore. And it's not residency specifically that has depersonalized me. It's the ebb and flow of life and making decisions before I have the time to ruminate over my thoughts in a thousand words in a word document, or in a blog entry. I've moved faster than the estimation of myself.

I've even started questioning if I want to be a wife and a mother. I have to remind myself at intervals, of course I do. Do I? Yes. I manage women labor, put their babies on their chest, constantly imagining what I would prefer when I'm delivering, how I hope I am able to handle labor, imagining my husband at my side. Of course I want that...

...or do I?

Life for a while was a constant quest of me searching how to be. How to be optimally, to earn the most love from Allah (swt). And in the course of mindfulness, I learned to be enough, enough right now, enough for myself, to be myself. But in the background, there's the historic me who thought that there was no such thing as being oneself. To be oneself was to be satisfied with the innate mediocrity that we are instead of striving to be better. To never be satisfied with oneself was to be striving. To struggle daily because marriage was not in site was a worthy struggle, because I was struggling in the way of God and what He wanted for me in such a relationship and not settling for less. Prayers were much more cathartic that way.

There was baseline worthiness that I thought would be accomplished by being a baseline Muslimah...five pillars, the minimum, modesty at the minimum. And I never got there...never all at once. And I didn't feel worthy unless I got there.

And probably I was still single because God knew it would be best for me to get there instead of looking for spiritual and religious guidance too much in a man, a future husband. He wanted me to rely on myself, I told myself. I prayed for the best husband I could have on this earth, and it's taking so long because that's what I prayed for, I told myself. Meanwhile, each prayer became like a plead and my pain and depression etched battle scars into my being, that which I thought was worthy, worthy and the struggle for God.

This is the way we are all supposed to live, ultimately, I told myself, if we only knew. Life is struggle enough, but if we're putting it in the right place...I may not understand it now, but it'll only reap rewards for me. This is why God constantly reminds us that the next life is better than this...

...and so I lived a life not so much for the next life but for the next moment and the next stage of being.

I wanted very many things, actually. A certain type of being, a certain type of husband so I could raise a certain type of children, all that would fit into what I already had going for my career. I imagined a being where I was more fit than I am, thinner than I am, hair healthier than it is, clothing my own brand of modesty and elegance as it's not. I hoped to redefine myself into this woman upon entering residency, and instead, I remained as I've always been. Jeans and a blouse, sometimes dry and matted puff on my head.

I acquired a man who loves me, and I him, who will not be that certain type of husband. Nor do I want to be.

I wanted very many things for myself that I convinced myself at one time did not exist and now that I'm over them and I see that they do exist, I no longer want them.

I still want to live God-conscious, but I'm finding a more organic way to do that than molding myself into what I should be to be enough, when we are always enough. God did not create mediocrity. My paradigm is partly the pleasure of God but it's also the understanding of a life that is supposed to bring us the most benefit and equilibrium.

...or is it that I still don't want it?

All in Love is Fair

As salaam alaikum,

It's but the grace of God that I'm able to stand strong today was able to yesterday and iA will tomorrow.

I'm just so happy in life and in love right now, I just had to document it. I'm tired and if I want at least seven hours of sleep, I should go to bed now, but I just wanted to say that I've never been happier in space and time as an adult than I am right now.

Part of this epiphany is realizing that I appreciate love for its own sake. I love love for love's sake. For the first time, nothing has to happen to it. It doesn't have to be destiny, transcendental, anything like that. My capacity to love and the way I love is enough. It's a journey, not a destination, and I love to live in it, bask in it.

It's like my story, "Caso com Luiza" (which I have decided to call it...either that, or "Caso com Você, Luiza). Their love best existed in that moment when they were young and innocent, and in that memory, and was not to go on.

And so have various loves for me.

I like to go back and revisit them sometimes. If I close my eyes, the feeling is fresh and new, like the spring breeze out of my open window for the first time in the season. Like "Pense em Mim" by Tim Maia always feels like spring, especially when I remember the first few times I heard the song.

It's the prototypical heartbreak that I feel when I think of the first line of the last poem I wrote, "I wish I would not melt into you, my oblivious haunter," and the beauty of every other heartbreak, summarized by Djavan's "depois que eu descobri que há você, nunca mais existi."

It's that electric shock I felt the first time I gazed into his green eyes. That realization that it only feels like destiny because the attraction is so strong. It's loving him when there's no sunlight to make those eyes sparkle green and everything is status quo.

It's the moment his neutral face becomes endearing. When him cleaning your nose in the same breath he kisses you goodbye is the turning point, where all the other loves don't matter because he is here now.

(Each of these are different instances and different people.)

Love is so many things. It's remembering my grandmother when she could walk and before she started her path through dementia and how I know that woman exists through it all and hopefully is not suffering too much with her own cognitive decline. It's pain, it's sadness, it's joy and celebration of a wonderful woman with a replete life of more complex love than I can imagine.

Love is the feeling I get when I think of the lyrics that remind my mother the most of my brother when he was diagnosed with autism: "You make my soul a burning fire. You're getting to be my one desire. You're getting to be all that matters to me." And understanding what it means for a mother to only think about one of her children for years and years.

And finally, this is what I want my love to be: My Love.

[uncensored]: It's Time for me to Wake Up

As salaam alaikum,

It's early morning, I don't have any clinical or community medicine project responsibilities this morning other than putting together an outline to email to my adviser early this afternoon. Applicants will be submitting their rank lists soon and after a busy application season, I suddenly feel ambitious like I never have before.

Maybe this is what happens after you read Christopher Dorner's manifesto first thing in the morning.

I began to think of the state of black people, and specifically black men, in this society. Do not read me wrong, I am not condoning Dorner's actions. The manifesto was completely crazy-pants and any salient points he made about dysfunction and corruption in the LAPD are virtually muted by the fact that his solution is a murderous rampage. I think the whole thing is an unfortunate mess that will not bring about an overhaul of the LAPD or any similarly-functioning police departments but has the potential to result in the death of innocent black or black-looking people who may or may not look like Dorner, as well as whatever other innocent victims Dorner may target in the coming days.

He said a lot in his manifesto about clearing his name. Talk about the opposite of clearing your name, but anyway. That got me thinking about men and the importance of power and position for them. It got me to thinking about what an affront and how emasculating it must be for men to lose position, face, title, influence, whatever the mode of power they feel like they've earned or were otherwise entitled to.

Is it always emasculating? I feel like I'm making a grand gender generalization.

Anyway, this briefly reminded me of an undercurrent in many black families and in parts of the black community that black women have a duty to relate only to black men, and vice versa in a slightly different context. I wasn't raised with this notion but I do feel a special duty to black children, especially black boys, so it almost feels like abandonment sometimes that I am not wedded to marrying a black man.

But that's another topic altogether.

I started thinking about the U.S. penal system and how I won't even dignify it by calling it corrections. Because correcting what? Correcting nothing save by the wills of individual incarcerated souls that may be self-reformed and freed or may otherwise write and reach out to others to right wrongs, to speak out against injustice or to call upon them to not repeat their same mistakes. I opened up a documentary on the war of drugs that speaks a little bit about the U.S. prison complex, but I believe there's a new documentary out there that talks specifically about black men in prison. Anytime 1 out of 4 of the population of black men will spend some time incarcerated, there's a problem on some level, whether its the moral failings of a mass of unrelated individuals, the moral failings of a community or the moral failings of a society translated into law and so-called justice.

I thought about a lot of things. It all came to a head as I was reading the SNMA email newsletter and the first story (but not the newletter headliner) was titled "Black Males Not Applying to Medical School." The article pointed out that black male matriculation in medical school has only increased 36% since the late-70s, whereas males (and females) of other ethnic groups had tripled (Latinos) or even grew to nearly 10 times their 1970s demographic (Asians). Black females in medical school, much like undergraduate school, outnumber their male counterparts by 2:1.

The solution suggestion in the article? Strengthening the pipeline.

This speaks to a lot more than the college-to-medical-school pipeline and to whatever all is behind the fact that our men are so many times more likely to end up behind bars than any professional career.

In between reading this all this morning and drafting my community medicine project outline and thinking about match day and how we had no black male applicants to our program this year and that I've seen two total black residents in family medicine and how so few of my black classmates went into primary care and how I don't know of too many black medical students who aspire to primary care and how I could do a study on that and maybe if I have time during residency I should do a study on this because I think I know some of the reasons why...

...I woke up.

I'm sitting here in my bed, at my computer, lying in what I slept in, living room window open to a cloudy day and a cluttered living space, and I woke up.

I've been awake for three hours but I woke up to what is reality for me, what a lot of people see in me but I hadn't yet seen in me because I've spent so much time trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. There's a lot that needs to be done, and I was born to be one of the agents.

I am blessed to be able to be one of the agents. I was born on a platter of privilege, in upper middle class family and was raised in relatively safe neighborhoods, far from the realities of governmental corruption and economic stagnation of my father's country and far from the realities of senseless violence and economic dilapidation of my mother's home town. I was born and raised as a privileged, young black American-Nigerian American little girl who was allowed to be fat and cute and happy.

I entered the academic world with an unfortunate inferiority complex that sneaks up on me when I'm feeling the most vulnerable. You probably don't have a high IQ but you work hard, a guidance counselor told me in the 8th grade as he reflected on how I had all As. And I hate to admit it, but sometimes I believe that instead of taking responsibility for when I haven't read or haven't studied and haven't felt prepared.

I've let myself be dominated by this and other insecurities and have live a life where I haven't fully realized my privileges and blessings and instead am listening to nay-saying spirits that really have nothing to do with me. Old, warn-out, hackneyed narratives used generically to destabilize, even unintentionally, so powerfully interwoven into the fabric of our society that if anyone did it intentionally, they'd be genius, Nobel-prize level genius if the effort were at all worthy.

I don't even see what I've been blessed to accomplish, who I am...a dual-degree medical school graduate embarking on my career. I am the only black person in my residency program. I am one of four black physicians I've seen at my hospital. There may be a fifth somewhere. Sure, I've been scratching and surviving as an intern and I will continue to do so. However, I can't be who I am and have gotten to where I am and not do something about the fact that black men are more likely to go to prison than to pursue a professional career.

I'm not going to go through this residency with my tail between my legs. We all have a right to be individuals outside of our race or ethnicity but it's not in my blood to be an individual ignorant of these realities.

I am in medicine. This was my chosen path because of my Islam, because of my spirituality, because of my potential to serve. There are many causes and I have many dreams on many levels but I was privileged to not be a victim of racism and I will not think myself a victim of anything ever again, because I'm not. As I said previously, I am my own liable limitation.

I will not envision myself a hero but as an agent to a movement that's already happening. My men, our men, men who have melanin in their skin like I do and kinky hair like I do who grew up in homes like mine and homes very much unlike mine are feeling emasculated in a society that historically views them as less of a man, has made fetish of their sexuality, and in so many other ways has undermined their existence and vital purpose in our society. And again, I hope I'm not generalizing, but I think this is devastating to the psyche.

That article talked about how the waning numbers of black men going into medicine could effect numbers going into primary care with the thought that black people best serve black people and maybe we could get a handle on disparities if there were more black people in the field, at least 13%, so we could be representative of our U.S. population.

My point is, there's some deep-rooted shit that's the reason that so few black men are going into medicine or any other professional field, and why so many are in prison, and why states have historically looked at their third-graders to determine prison enrollment. And we all can't be physicians or professionals, but really, who has to be in jail?

It's time for me to stop being a victim of my own mind, of my own insecurities and fears holding me back from being what I need to be.

It's time for me to start becoming the strong, intelligent black female physician of today because of alhamdulillah all I've been given.