To the achieving underachiever
You don’t need to introduce yourself.
To the untrained eye you may inhabit the role of diligent student/upstanding employee seamlessly, but there are telling signs that separate you from the ordinary.
It’s the extra crease on your forehead during every exam, which comes from knowing quite well that you spent more time preparing your study materials than actually studying.
It’s the way you catch your breath every time you get called on because you’re aware that this might be the time your shortcomings are finally catching up with you and your rites of execution are seconds away from the tip of your senior’s tongue.
It’s the way you always fall back on your charm and wit to create smokescreens and mirrors to hide what you lack.
It’s how you always assume a carefree air about yourself because you know no one will fully comprehend how you live in a state of uncertainty, being in a perpetual tug-of-war between the bipolar opposites of feeling invincible and incapable.
It’s how, in spite of all that, you still get respectable marks yet have such a volatile concept of self-respect.
It’s painfully trite to say it takes one to know one, but in this case it cannot be helped. I know you because I was you. I was you in my entire academic career, from grade school to medicine school to my almost-employment.
I’ve made succeeding without really trying my dictum, occupation and prayer. The middle child of three girls, I have as birthright being the oddest of the tres marias, scribbling outlandish fiction, preferring the company of adults, and always finding myself facing the wall for speaking out of turn.
In grade school I always merited a medal at the end of every academic year, eventually graduating in the top 10 of the batch.
In my science high school, I graduated as a batch achiever.
In my premed course, I graduated with Latin honors and thereafter completed medicine school, which culminated with passing the physician licensure examination, garnering varying distinctions in between.
My parents were in awe of how I glided through every semester armed only with my barely touched handouts and a smile and a wink.
My sisters were slightly distressed at having to compete with my atypical and unorthodox virtues.
My close friends, who knew of my internal resistance to study or even just to attend class, envied me, lauding my dependable wit and exacting exam-taking skills which never failed to deliver me at least a “pass” on every subject.
The praise always fell dull and flat to my ears. I knew why. Because it was essentially a celebration of my mediocrity — mediocrity in the sense that there was sentient and studied laxity in everything I did.
Making the best out of the least put me smack-dab in the middle of the spectrum of what I could have been. Thus, there was always a cloying sweetness to every success and an almost welcome bitterness to every failure.
I was in the middle of my medical preresidency program in one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country when I suddenly felt the fragile plaster of my facade starting to crumble, showing the scaffolding beneath, precariously and barely holding up my sense of self-actualization.
I was no longer in the classroom where being study-savvy is adequate and the worst you can do is shade in the wrong set. This time, you go down the wrong prong of the diagnostic algorithm and morbidity and mortality can ensue.
It took me two tries to quit the program. On my first try I was dissuaded from doing so and was told I was one of the top performing candidates in the program. And so I tried again, feigning ignorance of the impending implosion I knew was inevitable. A few days later, I left the hospital and I haven’t gone back since.
It took me more than two decades to be able to honestly attest to the impossibility of having absolute satisfaction in a life underdone.
I will never escape the siren call of medical practice, and I know I will soon be back in the familiar sterile stomping grounds in my white coat, with the comforting weight of my stethoscope wreathed on my shoulders, clutching at patient charts and sometimes at straws. But for now I am on a journey of understanding, amending and forgiving myself for all the bygone potential.
Marianne Williamson captured the very essence of human ingenuity and hubris in saying that our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate but that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is the light that casts the shadow that most frighten us. It is the knowledge that we are created capable of greatness and yet still fall short of it that leads us to dress up our fear in the comfortable cloak of marginality that’s so fashionably unassuming and handy.
So to you, achieving underachiever, I give you my hard-earned, unsolicited advice. Let the cloak fall by the wayside and tread into the light. Let your peaks fly as high and fantastic as fireworks and your troughs be as low as the canyons carved out by the wind and water of adversity.
In the end contentment is not measured with merits and failures, but with a life lived to the fullest of your potential, illuminated and liberated by the light.
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Mae Gianelli Boco, MD, 25, is in between postgraduate internship and preresidency.
