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

if they burst through the doors now and I’m off the course just like that because I’m drunk, there’s a hundred medical students here but it would be just my luck wouldn’t it, I’d be the one, they’d say “future doctors don’t drink Thatcher’s Haze, you’ve had too much, you’re jeopardising public trust in the medical profession, time’s up”. This year, Covid-19 restrictions have been the perfect breeding ground for my doubts and insecurities. The “negative selfschema” has become a broken record of “what if someone saw when I put my hand on my friend’s shoulder when we were walking around the Downs / when I went into their house to do a wee / when I met up with seven people outdoors”. There are informants hiding behind every tree; cameras in the garden; MI5 agents on the specific mission of catching me out and reporting me to the GMC. It’s been a while now and I should be pretty secure in my medic identity. I’ve passed the exams, I’ve got my mini-CEXs, I’ve got “a pleasure to work with” and “a great member of the team” immortalized in annual TABs. But there’s always something, there’s always a little niggle. And I’m trying to work out why. Perhaps it’s something to do with my demographics – maybe the boys don’t feel like this, maybe the private school alumni don’t have to watch their back every wrong turn, maybe I’d have more confidence if I’d taken a gap year. But really, I embody all those labels that this broken society favours - I’m “middle class”, white, able-bodied. When my laptop broke in first year, I could buy a new one; during lockdown 1 stuck at home I had that sacred room of one’s own to work in. If this is how I feel, how much harder must it be for those who don’t, like me, have the money or whiteness or able body? “I know it’s a cliché, but I really have always wanted to be a doctor”. That was innocent 17-year-old me, trying to impress the stern examiners in the Anson Rooms of Bristol Student Union. I dreamt of being a medical student most of my short life, but maybe that is the exact problem – a dream can never feel real. We call doctors lifesavers, extraordinary, “NHS heroes”. But they’re not – they’re human, and medical students are too. Notoriously we are perfectionists, and we measure ourselves against incredibly high standards. Maybe we need a bit of that drive in order to succeed, but if the goal is becoming superhuman, that’s a battle we can only lose. Maybe it is just me who feels like this, but my guess is that most of us succumb to the “imposter phenomenon” from time to time. The sooner we realise what our brains are doing to us, the sooner we can halt their self-destruction. The truth is, I got this place at medical school because I deserved it, and you did too. We do our best. We’re not perfect, but we’re good enough. We will make mistakes (hopefully not too many of us will prescribe penicillin to someone who’s allergic, but you know, as long as you reflect and learn from your experience…) but that is part of life. Take a deep breath, fling your lanyard round your neck and let’s go get ‘em.

Anonymous