New Year, New Me.
It’s New Year’s Day, 2024. I was now in my second gap year before medical school. I had racked up significant credit card debt thanks to my first post-grad job as a dermatology medical assistant ($17/hour in the DMV should be a crime) and had an MCAT date for January 18. Naturally, I made the spontaneous decision to purchase a round-trip ticket to London in April to visit a boy from high school whom I had kindled a romantic relationship with over winter break.
Very wise, Catherine.
Booking my round-trip flight to London on January 1st, 2024.
Justifying my impulsive decision was the next challenge since it was out of my character. As a first-gen, I’ve been hard-wired to always have a plan and stick with it. I said BS things like “Oh, it’s for self-growth…It’s a mental break from MCAT studying…” I refused to admit that a boy had been the motivation for my trip.
In February, I received my MCAT score and felt completely defeated. However, I wasn’t completely shocked by the result since I had been working full-time and was aware that I had spread myself thin with studying. With plans to apply to medical schools in May, I knew I needed to act fast. After two days of consulting with family, friends, and mentors, I made the difficult decision to resign from my full-time position as a pediatric medical assistant to commit myself to the MCAT grind. Despite this unforeseen barrier and backlash from my family, my plans to visit Europe in April remained intact. I needed something to look forward to.
Come early March, I was officially unemployed with the exception of my dogsitting side hustle. I attended my friend Liv’s housewarming, and we exchanged life updates over wine and charcuterie. For context, Liv and I met through a pair of U.S. Marines that we briefly dated from April to August of last year. While the boy I dated is now married to a woman he met four months after a weekend trip to Boston, Liv and I’s friendship blossomed out of our shared marine boy trauma. At the time of her housewarming, Liv and I were no more than social friends who would menace together at Player’s Club in DC. I told Liv about my upcoming Europe trip and was surprised by her interest in joining. I had planned to travel solo to Portugal and Spain while London boy was working during the work week, but as an inexperienced international traveler, I entertained the idea of her company. However, we would soon encounter the largest barrier to our plans to travel together internationally: Liv’s Volo kickball league that meets every Thursday.
Less than two weeks later, Liv came to the realization that Europe is way cooler than kickball in the same city she has been living in since her undergraduate days at Georgetown University. She booked her round-trip flight to London and I adjusted my accommodations for two in Portugal and Spain. Liv planned to visit an old friend in London during our time there, which worked out perfectly since I was to stay at London boy’s flat. I did not expect that nine days before my flight from Dulles to Heathrow for London boy to inform me that he had started dating a girl, and it would be “awkward for her” if he were to host someone he was previously romantic with. Shocker. He offered to pay for my London accommodations to make up for his last-minute cancellation. I declined his offer, denying him the opportunity to applaud himself for committing an insincere act of selflessness.
I let myself grieve over the death of my abroad romance for a day. After countless failed post-grad situationships I had become a master at accelerating the “healing” process. I felt stripped of the subconscious fear that three blissful days in London would send me further down the spiral of falling for someone I realistically could never be with. I could now look forward to Europe with zero expectations.
Despite the harsh things I said to London boy during our twenty-minute phone call, I am grateful that he pushed me to see the world. Being the only child of a single immigrant mother, I’ve always made an effort to stay close to home. Further, my mother and I were low-income which meant that traveling was the least of my mother’s priorities. The only country I’ve traveled to within my memory was my mother’s homeland of the Philippines. As the eldest of ten siblings, it was my mother’s responsibility to tend to family matters. I have endured the 18-hour flight on five separate occasions, yet we rarely left the confines of the province of Cavite. When choosing a college, I drew a circle around the DMV, limiting myself to a three-hour drive radius. Within that radius was the University of Richmond where I attended from 2018-2022. While I was never afforded the luxury of family vacations as a child, I take pride in my upbringing as it has granted me the open-mindedness to immerse myself in other cultures and the confidence to take risks just as my mother had when she left her country nearly 30 years ago. On this trip, I learned that Liv and I share much more than our affinity for toxic men. She too hails from an immigrant family and recognizes the privilege of traveling, which I felt allowed us to truly savor our abroad experience.
After graduating, I often missed the drive I had as a first-gen college student: I worked multiple jobs both on and off campus, wrote an honors thesis on my four years of undergraduate research, and graduated Summa Cum Laude with Honors. When you’re in school, your grades and your class standing are quantifiable measures of success. Once the feeling of accomplishment subsided, I began to envy my friends making six-figure salaries right out of college and settling in the cities of their dreams. One by one, my fellow pre-med classmates started medical school. In a single blink, I was taking one, then two, and now approaching three gap years before medical school.
I had been obsessing over the fact that I was falling behind the pack, that I gave little appreciation towards the young woman I was growing into. Every failure has been a lesson. When I was reluctant to quit my job, a mentor of mine simply stated that I’d have the rest of my life to work. All this time I had been searching for a tangible metric of success when the only question I should have been asking myself was if I was happy. The beauty of traveling internationally is the ability to see how other cultures don’t revolve around living to work. I think first-generation children are especially vulnerable to this notion as we watched our parents struggle to give us the opportunities they never had. While my mother was concerned about the finances of my trip, it still brought a smile to her face to see her only child visiting parts of the world she had never been able to explore. Even though she couldn’t join me on this trip, I hope to share the world with her someday.
I don’t encourage abandoning a stable career to go travel the world, but I am a big proponent that everyone is on their own timeline. My dream of becoming a doctor will live on and until I get there, I will continue to take my time, and explore more of the world in the process (once I’ve secured a 510+ MCAT score and paid off my credit card debt, of course).
