A Letter To My Younger Self
Annie Yu, 2T2 PB
& Sarah Ge, 2T2 Fitz
Artist’s Statement: Annie Yu and Sarah Ge, 2T2 students, are the co-founders of Palette Magazine. As they approach the end of their time in medical school, we invited them to share their reflections on the last four years and the role that arts and humanities have played in their lives, in the form of a “Letter to my Younger Self.”
April 25, 2022
Dear Annie,
One night you’ll walk into your apartment and see water gushing onto the floors from the air-conditioning machine. You’ll be briefly paralyzed and then scream for help into an unfortunately empty hallway (oops). When The Flood happens, you and Sarah should 1) unplug all the electrical outlets, 2) call 911, and 3) trust that very soon your entire building will recover. Troubles like this remind you that you don’t own anything, not even your fears or pains. You can’t hold onto moving water no matter how tight your fist.
The flooded home isn’t the same home that you’re in right now, and for a long time after you leave your current one (and probably always), you’ll keep tugging at the good memories. Memories like baking elaborate cakes and the daily conversations on the couches and decorating your first live Christmas tree. But I promise in both homes you’ll have birthday streamers pinned across the walls for forever. You’ll dig deep into the places you live and cry at parties and learn how to love from scratch again.
When you first start clerkship, you’ll be really, really excited. People will tell you how medicine won’t take care of you, but the people who tell you this will. They’ll remind you to eat even when they won’t, and you’ll later inherit their habit of having only a meal a day, amongst other untenable ones. Those won’t sustain you and you’ll start to feel trapped again. You’ll realize that you won’t know the answers every time, or even most of the time. Your patients will wonder if you can truly understand their despair. There will be the 15-year-old with alopecia and the 72-year-old with metastases all over but who will still try to crack jokes with you. You’ll grieve with them and laugh with them; they’re the ones who will teach you optimism. Eventually you’ll talk about Palette for fourteen days straight on Zoom and think about how colouring outside the lines can make a good difference in medicine. I’m grateful for your courage, and more importantly, for the people around us who raised this abstract baby.
What else? I wish I could tell you that I’ve cracked the code and there’s nothing but glowing light ahead. But the truth is that these days I still struggle in the same way that you do, that even after having what I should want I’m still wading through muddy puddles. Give up on the ghosts. In Chinese we say 舍得, which means a willingness to shed, and that the shedding has to precede the having. Fail. Okay, again. You’ll slowly get better at what you’re trying to do despite often believing that you’ll never learn. All your life you’ve had your hands on the brakes worried about letting go, but the next few years will push you out from the tunnel and into the open air.
Maggie Smith: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.
Dear Younger Self,
It seems like only yesterday that I began medical school – sitting amongst my classmates in MSB, haphazardly scrapping together CBL responses, and having breakfast with my ICE group in Li Ka Shing. I remember the beginning being overwhelming and nerve-wracking. But, when I look back at the whirlwind of experiences that is preclerkship and clerkship, I remain incredibly grateful for its unexpected twists and turns. 4 years later, I am different but still the same.
Palette Magazine was born almost serendipitously; it was more of an inside joke than a concrete idea. In a Google Docs folder called “abstract baby” was the beginnings of a whim, but at its core was the steadfast belief that the human connection underlies so much of what we do in medicine. It’s the connection I found in my friendship with Annie, hidden somewhere amongst the pages of Palette’s first issue. But it’s also the connection I found amongst the greater medical community. The humanities impart a deeper understanding of our interactions not only with patients but also with each other. Despite our individual journeys in medicine, art builds connection by conveying how we experience hardship, growth, and love. And it’s this sense of overarching comradeship – that we were all in this together – that comforted me during some of the most difficult moments in medical school.
And there were really challenging moments, some of the most challenging in my albeit very short 24 years. There’s the sheer exhaustion of showing up every morning (I’m really not a morning person), the looming dread of a 5-letter acronym that is etched in my memory (if you know, you know) and the crippling isolation of COVID-19 (am I the only one feeling this lost?). During clerkship, I also witnessed the extremes of the human experience: the death of my first patient; the grief of someone’s mother; the joy of the first breath of life in a delivery. I had to be thoughtful about how all of this affected me. One of the most humbling lessons I learned is that not all patients have easy answers or happy stories. The difficult reality is that there are limits to the answers we can give in medicine. But the connections you build with your patients and with each other, that’s something that makes a difference when all the medical therapies and procedures have failed. At the end of the day, medicine is intrinsically linked to the human condition – our everyday job is just as much about understanding the suffering and joy of our patients, as it is about learning the sciences. It’s the person beneath the patient that you can’t lose sight of.
I don’t know what the future would bring, so I won’t get into that. To my younger me, I would say to be kinder to yourself. You will make mistakes, that’s okay. Things matter less than you thought they would. Your identity is so much more than your preceptors’ evaluations, your performance on an elective or your future dream residency. Something it feels like all we talk about is medicine. But who you are outside of medicine is entirely yours and the richness in experience you bring – that is so unique to you.
I am still learning what I’ve learned over the past 4 years. I’m so excited for you to learn it. Good luck!
Sincerely yours,
You from the future
