Content Warning: This piece contains a description of sexual assault.
I grew up with zero desire to go into medicine. Never thought about it. Don’t know why I would have. First of all, I hated science because I wasn’t good at it. Second, I cared way more about what people thought of me than the actual people. Oh, and I judged people who tried hard because fear of failure kept me from ever really trying.
There were only a handful of things I did try hard in—one of them being fitting in. I didn’t know who I was, but I was always convinced that nobody would like me if they knew “the real me.” So I quickly chameleon-ed myself into whoever I thought my environment wanted me to be. Some people live a life in pursuit of fame, some wealth, and some knowledge—I lived only to be liked and accepted.
I took on the flavors of whoever was around like a floating piece of tofu, until I sank to the bottom of the pot and couldn’t get back up.
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October 10th, 2014 was the turning point.
October 10th, 2014 really, really hurt.
It hurt so bad that on October 10th, 2015 ( I “humorously” call it my first “assault-versary”), a friend woke me because I kept screaming “no, stop” in my sleep.
I became a person who banged her head against the wall to stop a headache. I abandoned myself because I thought I was broken beyond repair. I gave up on school, friendships, and ultimately myself. I did risky things. I hurt people. What’s the point anyway? My efforts to be liked had always been driven by fear—an insatiable desire to feel accepted and therefore safe.
Still I wasn’t safe.
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But you know what? Transforming a house requires tearing the old one down.
It also requires other people, and my story wouldn’t be possible if the right people hadn’t entered my life at the right time. I met Dr. M right after I dropped out of college. She was the first therapist I had ever seen, and she changed my life. Dr. M saw me at my absolute worst: no masks, no costumes, just my crumbs. But she saw me. Despite desperately wanting to be seen, I had never allowed anyone to truly see me.
Sometimes one person is enough to flip a lifelong script.
Dr. M saw me. She did not leave. She treated me with love and kindness when I didn’t think I deserved any. She stayed by my side and held my hand so I could look right in the eyes of my demons—so the demons and I could make peace.
From there on, I began opening myself up to being loved for me. I developed real friendships with caring, genuine, and intelligent people who held up the mirror for me, so I could begin getting to know the real me. The real me, I found out, was smart, empathetic, and funny. Well, not funny to everyone, but that’s all the better—not being everyone’s flavor meant that I finally stopped living as tofu.
Trauma transformed me by cracking me open and bringing me back to myself.
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The second part of the transformation story is my journey to medicine.
It was pretty simple. I wanted to pass on the love and kindness that had been so freely given to me. I wanted to become someone useful—someone who interacts with suffering and channels healing. So I returned to college. This time I had a purpose.
Suffering. Healing. Until this point, the word “medicine” rarely crossed my mind, but I started hearing it—repeatedly—from a place deep inside my heart.
Yet even the thought sent me into a shame spiral. Who do you think you are? What makes you think you could be a doctor? There were too many barriers to becoming a physician. I am an immigrant, and no one in my family had any connections to the medical field. I thought I had already made way too many mistakes. I told myself that I would never be good enough.
I chose to major in Psychology, which came much easier to me than the hard sciences. At the same time, I continued working hard on healing. Through yoga and meditation, I rediscovered a connection to my body that had been robbed from me. I started writing daily gratitude lists—a simple action that transformed my perception of the world. I processed my experiences through writing, and found strength in it through sharing with others.
Of course, I didn’t have everything figured out. I enjoyed my studies. Yet deep down, I still felt a pull toward medicine—a pull that I suppressed and hid away because of self-doubt, low self-esteem, and fear of failure.
Then what happened?
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Two years into my journey of recovery, I was finishing my sophomore year with perfect grades. I taught fitness on the side at a nice local studio. There, I got to hold space for people from all walks of life on their journey to come home to their bodies.
In this new life that I was given, I woke up every morning excited to participate in life—both my own and others. I used to wake up every morning disappointed that I didn’t die in my sleep.
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Then, the week after I finished sophomore year finals, I went to get a massage near school.
That evening, the masseur climbed into the massage bed and assaulted me.
Plot twist, I know.
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It was painful, of course it was. That day I got home and all I wanted to do was shower his sweat off of my skin. I sat in the shower for a very long time. Then something else happened.
Have you ever been stressed about school, a relationship, your looks—and then you catch a glimpse of the night sky, or sunrise, or the unceasing waves of the ocean, and in that moment all your worries just become so insignificant?
My self-doubts, my little fears, the “what if I fail?” and “I’m not good enough,” all of a sudden just became silly.
What a waste of energy. There is so much pain in this world. People get hurt, so badly, all the time.
I had been drawn toward medicine for its ability to heal. Deep down in my heart, I knew that becoming a physician would allow me to stand by the side of people in the worst pain and despair, and do the best I can to guide them toward healing. If I let my fears stop me from giving it a shot, isn’t that selfish? What if I took all the time I spent thinking “I’m not good enough” and put it into actually thinking about other people? What if I take all that energy I wasted fearing failures, and instead focus on how I could help?
Two weeks later, I went into my course registration and signed up for my first college-level science class. Then, the second, the third… I took classes and worked the whole year long. I gave it my all.
And now I am here.
I still wake up in disbelief that I am at Penn Med.
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Bad things happen. They always will. But the darkest days of my past are what transformed me into who I am today. They led me into medicine. They have allowed me to help others in ways I would have never been able to before. And one day, they will make me a better physician. For these reasons, they were the best things that have ever happened to me.
I am not here to tell you how to deal with the traumatic things that have happened to you. No one gets to tell you that. What I can share is that when I stopped asking “why did this happen to me?” and instead focused on “how can I use this experience to help others?” I began to be transformed.
So have faith. Be kind. And if you are suppressing any of your demons in order to push on through, I hope you know that you deserve to invest in yourself and your healing. This is the most important work. More than memorizing another cytokine or bacteria, this is what will make us the best physicians we can be.
We will be healers. We simply can’t fully attend to someone else’s wounds while bleeding internally ourselves.
We owe it to our patients, to this world, and to ourselves to heal.
Yuchen Chen is an MS1 at the Perelman School of Medicine.
Image by author.
