I'm taking a moment to thank God. Inside this head of mine is a world of doubt and comparisons, and recollection of past failures and many times I feel like I haven't progressed, but I stop and look and realize God is working in my life. It may not be at my timing but He's busily working and tweaking and opening doors. Just as I was going to wallow in another pit of sadness I remembered,
I made it into grad school.
Undergrad had put such a dampening on my spirit and academia and I were now strangers. I was no longer the straight A scholar. C's were common on my sciences and B's were shout-worthy. So here I was working part time in Illinois in a never ending love affair where my deepest concerns were as such,
Chipotle or
Panera?
Yellowtail or
Barefoot? I was in a world of absolute bliss. Weekend visits to and from the beau. Working a few days a week provided just enough for some rent, a trip home every so often and lots of fancy groceries. I carried on this way for a year or so and then reality hit me. My lease was up, it'd be time to make some real decisions. No full time jobs were coming in and I couldn't waltz in this fantasy world for much longer. I had bills and I couldn't survive as a tech forever.
Fast forward and I've moved back home. I'm now working full-time in a job that I prayed and prayed for. But oh so often we pray and we fast and we praise
then we complain. I was only a few months in and I realized the not-so-sweet community that existed in the rather contrasting NYC hospital systems. It was politics, it was money, many times conflicting legalities, it was ugly. It was my new job. I worked like a horse-literally and raked in dollars and also got slapped with heavy taxes. I thought I was doing pretty okay and then the questions came again trickling in like water that broke away from a dam.
So, what's next? You're not going to med school anymore? Why don't you try and be a nurse? You need to go back to school.
Oh, no pressure. I had started preparing for my GRE months before while still dancing in Illinois. But somehow the books got lost, tucked away in some neat corner, became door holders. It suddenly dawned on me that all around me were moving to, and some had already completed their next levels of academia. All of a sudden I was surrounded by doctors and masters candidates and I was here, a med tech trying to find myself, contemplating running away to France, maybe Italy.
Somehow I managed to simmer down just a little to creep a few minutes (literally) of GRE prep in a day. I would open my book on my 30 minute train ride. I'd flirt with it during lunch. Before I could develop any real study pattern, the big day had approached. Three hours later I came back with a score. It was average. Nothing to make the Ivy's flock and nothing to make the sub Ivy's flinch. It was then that I chose the flight response. Well, I don't want to do grad school anyway. I'll just put all my effort into med school. I left my GRE scores in the dark like a dirty secret and moved on to my new lover, the MCAT. It was only a few weeks in the game that I just knew this wasn't gonna work. Frantic now with no plan, I started to consider grad school again.
It was March 2013 when I began my search to my dismay; many schools had already met their application deadlines. I battled with myself; the times I should've been applying I was somewhere parading around in Trinidad or perhaps Jamaica. I was sad, I was angry, I felt hopeless. And then like a glimmer of light, in April, I found a SUNY school (I was particularly looking for SUNY/CUNY programs, because those would be fully paid for by my job) and I started to apply frantically. I did the most hated part of the process and asked for recommendation letters, of which I got one of two responses. So here I was, swimming in a pool of self-pity with one of two recommendation letters.
While good efforts don't go unnoticed, procrastination somehow always trumps. It was April 15, 2013 and my application was incomplete. The deadline was here and all I had was a pile of incomplete papers, no admission essay and no recommendation letters. At that point, I gave up. Running away to Europe seemed more plausible. I continued with life as usual, living purely in the moment.
As a killer revisits the murder scene, somehow I would continue to prowl over the school's website, looking and hoping for some change. It came. In May 2013 the school announced that deadline had now been extended to July 2013. I threw up my hands in ecstasy and felt like this could be it, there is hope.
Fast forward to June and I'm sitting in a hotel in Panama with a school acquaintance pouring out my academic failures. She'd finished her Masters a year before in Israel and she gave me hope, this could be done. So on our first day in Panama she helped me revamp my emails requesting recommendation letters and just like that we pushed SEND and prayed for something good. I got my first response only a few moments later. It was a teacher she suggested I ask. He was Trinidadian, distinguished chemistry professor, and he would talk to me in the hallways. PLUS, he had added my on Facebook. This was gold. He had to say yes, I knew he'd say yes. Why not see young people achieve? His response hit me like a cold piece of meat from the freezer. In the most cordial way, he said No. I was crushed, I wasn't used to this term "No". It was the beginning of a road that I knew I'd have to fight for and work harder for.
I rolled it off, fought back the tears, and sought other options. It wasn't until I returned home from my trip, broken about school and the rejection of a teacher that I lay in bed and I told God very wildly and boldly that I needed a recommendation letter. The next morning, it wasn't even 7 am and a light bulb went off. Ask your microbiology professor! At this point I had nothing to lose. I sent my generic email and waited. Around 8 am she responded with a willing
yes. I was ecstatic and starting to see the light.
July 1, 2013 comes and somehow I've managed to fumble and compile papers and transcripts and recommendation letters and GRE scores into a yellow envelope and submit it on the exact deadline date. Now, just wait. It was only after I submitted the documents that I realized I didn't have a plan B. What if I didn't get accepted? I'd made the mistake of only applying to one school. So I sat, and I waited and called and approximately one month later I got the exciting news I'd longed for--I'd been accepted!
God was still working with me and on me.
It's now October, and I look back on the whole ordeal like wow, did that really happen. I'm loving my professors and class is going great and I've now built up enough academic confidence to perhaps revisit my estranged lover, the MCAT. Still, taking baby steps and trying to be present; not dying in the past and not getting strangled by the future. But, facing each day with tons of inner reflection and conversations with God.
Signed,
Learning slowly about myself each day.
