IMPOSTER I love being a medical student. I love the learning, I love the patients, I love the lanyard. But I’m realizing now that, along with these loves, there are some strange, insidious, destructive other feelings that have followed me around since I first took my seat in St Michael’s Hill Lecture Theatre and Eugene Lloyd said that for at least half of us our future spouse was sitting in the same room. Every now and then I get the feeling that I don’t belong, or that I’m a fraud and I don’t deserve to be here. My thoughts can turn from good to bad to ugly in the space of a few seconds, and I’m fed up with this self-doubt and self-sabotage. Here’s a few examples I’m walking into Biomed (I know, crazy, we actually used to walk into buildings), feeling proud that I’m at medical school à I remember all the people that didn’t get into medical school and I feel guilty à I remember the fact the medical students are meant to be studious, and I feel undeserving of my place because I spend more time on Instagram than I do studying Or: My friend gets a high mark in a test and I’m proud of them à I start worrying that my mark was a little below the mean (within the standard deviation of course) à I start hating myself that my subconscious takes me to such a competitive place and wonder why I
can’t just be happy for someone else without making it all about me Since first year I’ve lived in fear of “getting found out”, of the medical school realizing they’ve “made a mistake”, that ticking the box that sent me an acceptance email was an accident and that I shouldn’t be here. The years spent leading to applying for universities and the years before that spent playing with toy stethoscopes and then arguing with a friend at school about who would be the best doctor and then cautiously contacting distant medical relatives and begging for work experience meant that when the email “we would be delighted to offer you at a place at Bristol Medical School” arrived I couldn’t quite believe it. Then there were the sleepless nights waiting for A level results and then they arrived and were perfect and then I was in. U1 by night; dissection room by day. Since then, I’ve been looking for excuses for them (“them” “them” the shape shifting heads of year, Hugh Brady, the mayor of Bristol, the BMA, GMC, MDU, FML, the government, God Himself, whoever) to realise their error and kick me out. In first year, it was when I forgot to accept my accommodation offer in time and almost didn’t have a place to live. Even if it was all fine in the end and all blew over and all la di la lovely jubbly why did you get yourself so worked up about nothing, I still told myself “that’s not what a medical student would do, forget an important deadline like that. You’re not good enough; what’s next, forgetting a patient’s allergies and prescribing penicillin?”. I would be on a night out in first year, dancing on tables in Brass Pig, flinging away my inhibitions with every twist or shimmy and then suddenly: what if they find out, what 14
