Where is Our Worth?

Robyn is becoming a regular writing partner and we are over the moon! What follows is a truly personal story and still, we can all relate.

“Your place in the family of things is undeniable. Worth is not earned; it is embodied.”

~Mary Oliver

She reminds us that our worth is woven into being, not doing.

"Withdraw to be a mother and perhaps you can return when you are ready to be a doctor"

That is the message I received from the Dean of Medical School during my second pregnancy. By then, I was already a mother, having taken a year-long break between my second and third years of medical school to stay home with my first baby. Well into my third year, I told the dean I was pregnant again and struggling.

He treated it as a problem with no solution.

I was on my first surgical rotation—neurosurgery. The hours were brutal: up at 4:30 am to walk to the hospital for rounds before the resident doctors and attendings arrived, not finishing until sometimes 10 or 11 pm. It was winter, and I was gripped with morning sickness that refused to let go as my pregnancy advanced. I threw up in the snowbanks on the way to the medical center and several times during the day. I knew the location of every bathroom in that building. Most days were spent in the OR assisting with surgeries lasting up to 10 hours, making for late nights and little sleep. At 16 weeks pregnant (full term is 40 weeks), I was physically exhausted, losing weight, and ill.

It had taken everything I could muster to make this second appointment with the dean.

"Can I take a few weeks off and return when I'm not so sick?"

You could read the impatience and frustration on his face. I was the problem. He sighed, sat back and then forward in his chair, his face flushing pink, eyes looking upward as he took a deep breath before speaking.

"No."

Even now, I can hear his voice telling me to withdraw. The unspoken message: I wasn't enough. I wasn't strong, worthy, or deserving of the opportunities bestowed upon me. I gullibly took that disdain into my being and filed it in a deep vault.

I lost my baby only a week later.

My example may seem dramatic, but it is far from unusual in our current systems. Our biology is still treated as a problem. We internalize the harmful messages of societal systems that diminish women (and other minority groups), even when opportunities look "equal"—the bias persists beneath the surface.

It’s stupid to ask women (or anyone) to be resilient enough to withstand broken systems. The question isn't whether women can "have it all" or whether we're strong enough to match impossible standards built around male bodies and male life cycles. The question is: When will our institutions evolve and change to honor the fullness of the human experience? When will we stop treating biology, caregiving, and the rhythms of life as problems to overcome rather than realities to accommodate? Until then, we keep losing talented women—along with the richness that diverse perspectives bring to our professions & workplaces.

It has taken me years to excavate that vault and examine what I stored there. To understand that the dean was wrong—not just about me, but about what medicine needs, about what strength looks like, about what bodies are allowed to do. It reminds us that our worth is woven into being, not doing. And now I know: I was worthy then, exhausted and sick and pregnant in that chair. I was worthy when I lost my baby. I was worthy when... 

I became a doctor despite it all—and I would have been worthy even if I hadn't. Our worth doesn't live in whether we can endure inhumane systems. It lives in us, unchangeable and complete.