I wrote this post in my first year of medical school. Hard to believe it has been almost three years since then. With medical school winding down and so many changes happening all at once, I am returning to the one thing that helps me better understand the complexities of life. I am also trying to return to things that truly make my life enjoyable, and writing is one of them. I hope to practice consistency with this and other aspects of my life. If you enjoy reading, please stop by. I hope to write something once or twice a week, and would like to keep myself accountable. If anything resonates with you, please leave a comment. And if you feel something here might help someone, please feel free to share.

Hi There!!

My name is Veronique, and I am a First Year Medical Student at the Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine.

One of my favorite things in the world to do, besides soccer, is writing. There is a sense of clarity one gets from letting one’s thoughts and musings be laid out on a page. Writing brings me calm in the wake of anxiety or confusion, and it helps me process the many things I ponder on a daily basis. 

I consider myself an introvert, and yet I am extremely curious. I love asking questions (if you have ever sat in a class with me I apologize), and I love finding out what makes people who and what they are. I have always wanted to write about, or do things that might be worth sharing with the world, things that others might be interested in reading and learning about, but somehow I always stopped short right after I began. I have spent many hours wondering why that is, and I believe I have figured out why. 

In Biology and Psychology courses, we are taught about Fight or Flight, the two directions our body machinery decides to take when faced with a challenger of any kind. See a bear, heart rate increases, pupils dilate, break into a sweat, possibly pee your pants, brain decides it cannot win a bear fight, RUN. See a snake, heart rate increases, pupils dilate, brain decides it can take it, FIGHT. These two routes have been the governing principles of our response to fear. I would like to think the great minds who came up with this missed a third, very important F. FREEZE.

Hear me out. Have you ever felt fear? Not the kind that sends your blood pumping and gets your legs ready to run, or your fists ready to fight, but the kind that slides icy cold fingers down your back, wraps them around your chest and squeezes? The kind that turns your eyes black, your hands marble and your feet into lead? The kind where your throat closes up, you cannot breath, the world tilts, fades and dances on an axis right before your eyes? The kind that makes you want to curl up on the floor in the corner of the room and do nothing for as long as you can? 

That, my friends, is the FREEZE. As I write this, my fingers are shaking, and my throat is clogged. That is how I feel around people every day, especially people I do not know, that is how I feel every time I open my mouth to ask a question or express an opinion or share a thought. I have always told people I am terrible at making friends. I realized lately that that is not true. I do think I am quite decent at meeting people. I realized it was not necessarily the meeting of people, but the energy I had to expend to overcome this Fear, this Freeze, that makes me decide to sit out in the corner and wait for someone else who does not have this issue to save me the trouble. I do not particularly like small talk, and I know that is an introvert thing, but this is more than just avoiding small talk. It is the reason I am selective of where I go and what I do everyday, who I interact with and how I spend my time. It is also the reason I find it very difficult to write. Fortunately or unfortunately for me, my curiosity is usually greater than my fear, and at this point in life I have decided to use that to my advantage.

 In July of last year, I was (finally) accepted to medical school (!) and despite the Imposter Syndrome and constant near-breakdowns of my first semester, I know that this is exactly where I want to be. Being a medical student has given me the opportunity to pursue a lifelong and well-chased dream. It has also given me a new opportunity to explore my love of writing. 

I had always thought of Medicine as an inherently ‘Science-y’ field, and the art of Writing as, well, an Art. A long time ago, those two things would never have collided in my mind. My Biology and Chemistry texts were always extremely dry, and I could picture the lanky, white men who wrote them sitting behind large desks, their dusty brown suits draped haphazardly across their chairs, white sheets of paper strewn about, with ink stains on their fingers and blotches on their extremely starched shirts. These days, after having read works by brilliant doctors and writers such as Oliver Sacks, Henry Marsh, Stephen Westaby, Frank Vertosick and many others, I know that the stories of patient struggles, medical conditions and everyday life as it pertains to the field of Medicine, can be constructed masterfully, enough to make them worthy of even the lay person’s time and attention. 

One of my biggest reasons for wanting to become a Physician was to be able to explain to my parents, and others like them, complex medical things in plain, simple English. It is a goal I work on in every patient encounter in school, and hope to keep refining as I progress on this journey. In the last eight months, I have studied so many fascinating diseases and concepts, and related them to the world as we know it, and I would like, by the medium of this blog, to share it with whoever comes across it. 

About a week ago, on the 21st of April, 2021, I celebrated my thirtieth birthday. As I do every year before I enter a new age, I took stock of my highs and lows of the year before. This time, however, I took stock of my entire life up to this point. I have had a number of soaring accomplishments, and many crippling failures. I have wasted more time procrastinating than I would like to admit, and I have let this fear, the fear of failure, the freeze, prevent me from following through many of the ideas I have come up with throughout the years.

The title of my blog is Live Your Fears. My biggest fear is living a half-baked life, having very little impact or not leaving my mark in the world one way or another. According to Shonda Rhimes, who is one of my biggest idols, the world is divided into 2 categories of people: The Thinkers, and the Doers. I have accepted the fact that I am a Thinker. But being a thinker gets you nowhere unless you put some of that thought into action. This blog, and anything I might be chanced to write about, is my small attempt at doing something more than just pondering the many mysteries of life. 

If you come across my blog, I hope you read a post or two. I hope you get something out of it, and if you do, I hope you let me know. I love answering questions just as much as I enjoy asking them, and I believe the world would be a much better place if we could try a little harder to better understand one another. 

Thank you in advance for your time, and I hope to hear from you!!