She was looking up at me with her bead-like deep brown eyes, the rest of her face hidden by the giraffe blanket she refuses to let go of. When I pulled the blanket away from her, she smiled at me, the largest and most beautiful toothless smile I have ever seen. I reached for her my niece, Zaida, and pulled her little chubby 6-month-old self and put her on the floor with her toys around her. I reached my hands toward her, open and facing up, and she reached for them, touching the edges of my hands and my fingers, discovering a small part of the human canvas.
She looked up at me through her dark eyelashes and smiled her toothless grin again. In those moments, she steals my mind and makes me think of nothing but her innocent, young, discovering joy.
Being home and away from the hectic school life has been bittersweet. I have loved waking up to the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, cherished sipping my morning coffee with Mama I have cherished the late night chats with Baba as we go over everything present and future. I have missed moments of sitting in solitude and letting my mind think of my empty to-do list.
I have appreciated feeling like myself again, finding my soul within the pages of the novel I am currently reading, and listening to the churning of my brain as it thinks of a few lines of poetry that I may add to my collection, a gift that only happens when my mind has time to be quiet, when my mind can simply be.
I have enjoyed being able to simply be.
But of course, being who I am means that I've spent a lot of my time "simply being" by reflecting on these last few months, these last few years. Lately, I have had many conversations with people regarding being comfortable with the deviation of their life plan. It was two year ago from this time of year that I set a deadline with my best friend, a deadline, for panicking about my life plan.
"We do not panic until it's January. Then we will reassess," she said.
What we were panicking about was my wait to hear back from the medical schools I wanted to hear from most. I had just completed my senior thesis, which remains to this day as my favorite project of ALL TIME, and I was questioning every aspect of my life choices. Maybe the lack of interview invites were meant to be a sign. Maybe I was in the wrong field and was ignoring my true passion, something that I was good at. Okay, really really good at.
What I am referencing here is literature and the art of analyzing and interpreting novels, poems, and stories. There is truly an art to it, and I felt drawn to the ease with which I felt I could be honest in my analysis. There was a sense of relief in being encouraged to share your thoughts about a piece without there being a right or wrong answer per se. I sat in those lectures without fear. I trusted my thoughts and believed in what I felt about a piece.
I felt comfortable. And when I was comfortable, I felt confident.
And yet, when I started out in college as a Biology major, I did not see literature as I learned to see it later. I had a Creative Writing minor, simply because I enjoyed writing poetry and wanted to continue to do it in an academic setting.
But while I discovered the body and scientific advances in my biology classes, I discovered myself in my writing classes.
Literature was easy, only because it was comfortable. In my science classes, I was nervous and anxious. I was always thinking of what I needed to know, how much I needed to study, why someone else knew more than I did, how could I become better. In my English classes, I got lost in the writing. I lost myself in thinking of what the author meant rather than thinking deeply about my own productivity. Literature pushed me to put myself into someone else's mind, dive into the depths of someone else's emotions, their reactions, the way they process pain, joy, love, and suffering. I analyzed the ways with which someone expressed their feelings and thoughts the way they did, and why that was significant.
I was encouraged to ask the cliché question of "so what?"
And that was enough to push me to dive deeper into myself, my identity, to question everything about who I was growing up to be and why I was choosing to be this person in particular. This was when the complications began, when English stopped being a way to be merely creative, but rather became a reason to question, and at times doubt, what I believed my life plan to be.
It seemed as though I was living my life like a double-sided coin. Depending on the class I was in, the coin was flipped. On each side of this coin was a completely different personality. While one personality was confident and unapologetically outspoken, the other was anxious and always challenged.
I will say that the differing environment of the humanities department and the science department is a huge contributing factor to this division. In a humanities lecture, there was a sense of unity. We built on each other's answers, added to our analyses. Our professors pushed us further, complimented our thoughts and ideas, and challenged us to dig deeper without making us feel as though we could be wrong, only not on the right path. In contrast, pre-med students had a tendency to be competitive, which is not necessarily their fault and more just the way that the game molded them to be. Once we were all applying, we would be competing for limited seats at institutions nation-wide. It was the nature of the game, and to win the game, you had to play the game. And sometimes that made you lose yourself in your competitiveness.
For me, that meant distancing myself from it more and more and finding solitude in the humanities, where I felt there was more room to express who I was, more room to explore who I could be.
So I spent a year and a half feeling as though these two parts of myself conflicted, and I just tried to be comfortable with the battle rather than try to understand it. Looking back now, I wonder if a part of me feared letting myself think too deeply about how passionately I felt about my literature studies, that somehow I might love medicine less, and deviate more and more from my life plan.
Funny how that happened regardless. However, it happened later because I pushed it off for so long.
However, midway through my Sophomore year, something changed. I was in a British literature class, and the professor started lecture by playing the video of the Pixar lamp, which played in the beginning of most Pixar movies (look it up if you don't recall what I'm referencing).
"How do we know what the lamp feels? How do we know when the lamp is sad? How do we understand the emotions of an object when it does not have a face?"
This idea is known as "Essentialism," which is defined as an educational theory that ideas and skills basic to a culture should be taught to all alike by time-tested methods (Merriam-Webster).
Basically, this means that we understand emotions and feelings that most people feel based on what we are taught throughout life. Experience teaches us to sympathize with individuals as we recognize emotions. This allows us to also recognize the similar signs of certain emotions in inanimate objects (such as in the case with the lamp).
It was in this moment that something in my mind clicked. There is a reason why I was drawn to literature despite by calling to medicine. It was not because literature and writing was merely a hobby, but rather because my calling to patient-care, I am drawn to the nature of understanding people at a deeper level through literature. So the process of discovering myself through my study of stories actually had everything to do with why I was so driven to work with people: I want to understand people at a deeper level, to be present in their moments of vulnerability, to feel their pain, to feel their sorrow, to lift them and strengthen them.
I remember I went home and cried to my dad, repeating "It all makes sense. Everything makes sense." I can't tell you why I reacted so strongly. It is still so vivid in my mind to this day, how I felt disconnected from lecture for a few minutes while the truth seemed to "connect" mentally. It was after this day that my parents stopped questioning why I chose to study English, even when I changed my major completely to English. They understood that this was how I was discovering myself and learning about other people. This is how I was molding myself into the physician I wanted to be, despite how "non-traditional" it seemed.
And yet, fast forward to my senior year when my medical school dreams weren't going as I had planned. This time, my life plan was deviating in a way that seemed out of my control. I had little choice here, and many people applying now or did apply will understand just how little choice you have in the process besides choosing where you want to apply. After that, you play the "waiting game."
What that meant for me was also playing the "doubting game." I began 2016 wondering if I had made a mistake in choosing this career path, wondering if there was a bigger reason that I changed my major, questioning my true reasons for choosing medicine. Could we really pick what we wanted to be at a young age and be right? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe 5-year-old Manar was wrong. Maybe 17-year-old senior in high school Manar was wrong. Maybe college Freshman Manar was wrong.
Maybe college Senior Manar was wrong too.
If you are there now, if you are questioning your self-worth because your life plan is deviating, let me tell you that there is more to you than your life plan.
I repeat, there is MORE to YOU than your life plan.
And now I'm going to make you think of the most cliché question in the English field: So what?
So what if your plan changed? So what if you didn't get accepted the first time? So what if your exams didn't go well? So what if you didn't get the 4.0 you wanted? So what if you lost some hobbies and found new ones? So what if your dream changed? So what if you take one, two, three gap years?
So what if you become someone else?
My life plan changed, and I am more and more grateful for that everyday. There is a lot of growing that occurs when your plan deviates, when your life story has 15000 plot twists you don't expect. I'm not saying you will smile through them. Do not think that I am discrediting the pain and struggle that it is to endure these plot twists. It's uncomfortable. It's painful. It's anxiety-inducing. But all change is.
Honestly, I believe that these plot twists force you to look at your life plan and accept the challenge, accept the plot twists, demand the challenge. You can look it down and show it how prepared you are to take on whatever life is going to throw next. You can be terrified, but you know you will be okay at the end of it.
So even in the midst of something that has such little choice, there still is choice. You choose to be comfortable. You choose to be strong, to accept the challenge. To choose to be determined to grow from this instead of let it take you down.
You choose to accept and appreciate the person you will become by the end of that challenge.
It took my three months to grow out of that self-doubt. At the end of that time, I found God again. I found belief in His life plan. I found a mentor in the medical field. I found myself, a new version of myself. I fell in love with medicine all over again, and this time for a better reason because I believe I became a better person. I had about eight more months of ups and downs from that time period before I got my first acceptance to medical school.
And I would not change a thing. I had grown into someone else.
I think of Zaida, and how she cannot tell me what she is thinking. I watch her explore the edges of my hands, think of the day she will be able to count my fingers, and understand what she's thinking when she looks up at me with her toothless grin. She's discovering the world without saying words yet. It is why many people fear the field of Pediatrics but why I am so drawn to it. There is an art to understanding someone who cannot tell you what they are feeling or thinking. There is an art to diving deeper and trying to unravel them. Children do not fear their growth, do not understand yet how life will change them. But they remain excited to explore, to know more, to see more, touch more.
I know they will keep reminding me of why I am doing what I am doing as they discover the world, one hand and toothless grin at a time.
She looked up at me through her dark eyelashes and smiled her toothless grin again. In those moments, she steals my mind and makes me think of nothing but her innocent, young, discovering joy.
Being home and away from the hectic school life has been bittersweet. I have loved waking up to the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, cherished sipping my morning coffee with Mama I have cherished the late night chats with Baba as we go over everything present and future. I have missed moments of sitting in solitude and letting my mind think of my empty to-do list.
I have appreciated feeling like myself again, finding my soul within the pages of the novel I am currently reading, and listening to the churning of my brain as it thinks of a few lines of poetry that I may add to my collection, a gift that only happens when my mind has time to be quiet, when my mind can simply be.
I have enjoyed being able to simply be.
But of course, being who I am means that I've spent a lot of my time "simply being" by reflecting on these last few months, these last few years. Lately, I have had many conversations with people regarding being comfortable with the deviation of their life plan. It was two year ago from this time of year that I set a deadline with my best friend, a deadline, for panicking about my life plan.
"We do not panic until it's January. Then we will reassess," she said.
What we were panicking about was my wait to hear back from the medical schools I wanted to hear from most. I had just completed my senior thesis, which remains to this day as my favorite project of ALL TIME, and I was questioning every aspect of my life choices. Maybe the lack of interview invites were meant to be a sign. Maybe I was in the wrong field and was ignoring my true passion, something that I was good at. Okay, really really good at.
What I am referencing here is literature and the art of analyzing and interpreting novels, poems, and stories. There is truly an art to it, and I felt drawn to the ease with which I felt I could be honest in my analysis. There was a sense of relief in being encouraged to share your thoughts about a piece without there being a right or wrong answer per se. I sat in those lectures without fear. I trusted my thoughts and believed in what I felt about a piece.
I felt comfortable. And when I was comfortable, I felt confident.
And yet, when I started out in college as a Biology major, I did not see literature as I learned to see it later. I had a Creative Writing minor, simply because I enjoyed writing poetry and wanted to continue to do it in an academic setting.
But while I discovered the body and scientific advances in my biology classes, I discovered myself in my writing classes.
Literature was easy, only because it was comfortable. In my science classes, I was nervous and anxious. I was always thinking of what I needed to know, how much I needed to study, why someone else knew more than I did, how could I become better. In my English classes, I got lost in the writing. I lost myself in thinking of what the author meant rather than thinking deeply about my own productivity. Literature pushed me to put myself into someone else's mind, dive into the depths of someone else's emotions, their reactions, the way they process pain, joy, love, and suffering. I analyzed the ways with which someone expressed their feelings and thoughts the way they did, and why that was significant.
I was encouraged to ask the cliché question of "so what?"
And that was enough to push me to dive deeper into myself, my identity, to question everything about who I was growing up to be and why I was choosing to be this person in particular. This was when the complications began, when English stopped being a way to be merely creative, but rather became a reason to question, and at times doubt, what I believed my life plan to be.
It seemed as though I was living my life like a double-sided coin. Depending on the class I was in, the coin was flipped. On each side of this coin was a completely different personality. While one personality was confident and unapologetically outspoken, the other was anxious and always challenged.
I will say that the differing environment of the humanities department and the science department is a huge contributing factor to this division. In a humanities lecture, there was a sense of unity. We built on each other's answers, added to our analyses. Our professors pushed us further, complimented our thoughts and ideas, and challenged us to dig deeper without making us feel as though we could be wrong, only not on the right path. In contrast, pre-med students had a tendency to be competitive, which is not necessarily their fault and more just the way that the game molded them to be. Once we were all applying, we would be competing for limited seats at institutions nation-wide. It was the nature of the game, and to win the game, you had to play the game. And sometimes that made you lose yourself in your competitiveness.
For me, that meant distancing myself from it more and more and finding solitude in the humanities, where I felt there was more room to express who I was, more room to explore who I could be.
So I spent a year and a half feeling as though these two parts of myself conflicted, and I just tried to be comfortable with the battle rather than try to understand it. Looking back now, I wonder if a part of me feared letting myself think too deeply about how passionately I felt about my literature studies, that somehow I might love medicine less, and deviate more and more from my life plan.
Funny how that happened regardless. However, it happened later because I pushed it off for so long.
However, midway through my Sophomore year, something changed. I was in a British literature class, and the professor started lecture by playing the video of the Pixar lamp, which played in the beginning of most Pixar movies (look it up if you don't recall what I'm referencing).
"How do we know what the lamp feels? How do we know when the lamp is sad? How do we understand the emotions of an object when it does not have a face?"
This idea is known as "Essentialism," which is defined as an educational theory that ideas and skills basic to a culture should be taught to all alike by time-tested methods (Merriam-Webster).
Basically, this means that we understand emotions and feelings that most people feel based on what we are taught throughout life. Experience teaches us to sympathize with individuals as we recognize emotions. This allows us to also recognize the similar signs of certain emotions in inanimate objects (such as in the case with the lamp).
It was in this moment that something in my mind clicked. There is a reason why I was drawn to literature despite by calling to medicine. It was not because literature and writing was merely a hobby, but rather because my calling to patient-care, I am drawn to the nature of understanding people at a deeper level through literature. So the process of discovering myself through my study of stories actually had everything to do with why I was so driven to work with people: I want to understand people at a deeper level, to be present in their moments of vulnerability, to feel their pain, to feel their sorrow, to lift them and strengthen them.
I remember I went home and cried to my dad, repeating "It all makes sense. Everything makes sense." I can't tell you why I reacted so strongly. It is still so vivid in my mind to this day, how I felt disconnected from lecture for a few minutes while the truth seemed to "connect" mentally. It was after this day that my parents stopped questioning why I chose to study English, even when I changed my major completely to English. They understood that this was how I was discovering myself and learning about other people. This is how I was molding myself into the physician I wanted to be, despite how "non-traditional" it seemed.
And yet, fast forward to my senior year when my medical school dreams weren't going as I had planned. This time, my life plan was deviating in a way that seemed out of my control. I had little choice here, and many people applying now or did apply will understand just how little choice you have in the process besides choosing where you want to apply. After that, you play the "waiting game."
What that meant for me was also playing the "doubting game." I began 2016 wondering if I had made a mistake in choosing this career path, wondering if there was a bigger reason that I changed my major, questioning my true reasons for choosing medicine. Could we really pick what we wanted to be at a young age and be right? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe 5-year-old Manar was wrong. Maybe 17-year-old senior in high school Manar was wrong. Maybe college Freshman Manar was wrong.
Maybe college Senior Manar was wrong too.
If you are there now, if you are questioning your self-worth because your life plan is deviating, let me tell you that there is more to you than your life plan.
I repeat, there is MORE to YOU than your life plan.
And now I'm going to make you think of the most cliché question in the English field: So what?
So what if your plan changed? So what if you didn't get accepted the first time? So what if your exams didn't go well? So what if you didn't get the 4.0 you wanted? So what if you lost some hobbies and found new ones? So what if your dream changed? So what if you take one, two, three gap years?
So what if you become someone else?
My life plan changed, and I am more and more grateful for that everyday. There is a lot of growing that occurs when your plan deviates, when your life story has 15000 plot twists you don't expect. I'm not saying you will smile through them. Do not think that I am discrediting the pain and struggle that it is to endure these plot twists. It's uncomfortable. It's painful. It's anxiety-inducing. But all change is.
Honestly, I believe that these plot twists force you to look at your life plan and accept the challenge, accept the plot twists, demand the challenge. You can look it down and show it how prepared you are to take on whatever life is going to throw next. You can be terrified, but you know you will be okay at the end of it.
So even in the midst of something that has such little choice, there still is choice. You choose to be comfortable. You choose to be strong, to accept the challenge. To choose to be determined to grow from this instead of let it take you down.
You choose to accept and appreciate the person you will become by the end of that challenge.
It took my three months to grow out of that self-doubt. At the end of that time, I found God again. I found belief in His life plan. I found a mentor in the medical field. I found myself, a new version of myself. I fell in love with medicine all over again, and this time for a better reason because I believe I became a better person. I had about eight more months of ups and downs from that time period before I got my first acceptance to medical school.
And I would not change a thing. I had grown into someone else.
I think of Zaida, and how she cannot tell me what she is thinking. I watch her explore the edges of my hands, think of the day she will be able to count my fingers, and understand what she's thinking when she looks up at me with her toothless grin. She's discovering the world without saying words yet. It is why many people fear the field of Pediatrics but why I am so drawn to it. There is an art to understanding someone who cannot tell you what they are feeling or thinking. There is an art to diving deeper and trying to unravel them. Children do not fear their growth, do not understand yet how life will change them. But they remain excited to explore, to know more, to see more, touch more.
I know they will keep reminding me of why I am doing what I am doing as they discover the world, one hand and toothless grin at a time.
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