it’s fun walking home alone at night. when men inevitably cat call, i can do nothing–or i can tell them off and watch my back all the way home. i’m always looking for witnesses in case of an ambush on the way to work, clearing my throat in case i need to scream, using a phantom number so i don’t have to give strange men the real one but it’ll still ring if he calls right away. i love worrying about men i don’t know, about men i do know, and potential threats to my physical safety. because somehow, they’ll ask what i was wearing and it’ll be all my fault.

Hi mom and dad, It’s me, your disappointing child. It’s difficult to admit how deeply my desire to please you and make you proud has defined the last near-decade of my young adult life, and even more challenging to know what to say after so many years of just…not saying. Med school is hard, mom and dad, but not as hard as navigating my desperate need for your approval. I’ve tried to free myself from that need. I’ve tried to focus on the love and support of my friends and siblings, to find peace in living out my faith, and to embrace the truth that my own pride in my accomplishments is more important than yours. But knowing something in my mind and feeling it in my heart are often galaxies apart from each other.

First off, much of our ‘scientific’ knowledge of human anatomy itself is a direct result of colonization. Not just the macro-scale colonization of Christopher Columbus landing on Turtle Island, but even the micro-scale colonization of so-called doctors experimenting on and extracting from non-white bodies. From the infamous ‘scientific’ experiments of the Holocaust on Jewish bodies to the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment to the robbed cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks, much of what we consider medical breakthroughs were the direct result of colonization and white supremacy. The justification that Aryan lives could be saved at the cost of non-white bodies is colonization 101.