How my concussion killed my inner Girlboss

A little before my 24th birthday, I nearly died, and in that almost death, as one often does, I found the truth of my life.

It’s quite cliche, I understand, that near death experiences teach you about what’s really important in life. But nearly dying is quite an expensive and dangerous way to learn something. Because what I learned was so crucial to my life, I will share it here for free for all the intelligent and driven young women who make up my audience.

Before my concussion, I was studying to take my MCATs for the second time—I had scored in the 98th percentile on the first attempt and because I was unsuccessful in getting into medical school, I wanted to get 100% this time. I was also simultaneously in the middle of pursuing a Master’s Degree in Neuroscience, a volunteer art teacher at the children’s hospital, TAing a human physiology course for third year university students and tutoring math to twelve year old boys on “my time off”.

As you can imagine, I was a little busy. Many of my extracurriculars of course were meant to help improve my application for medical school, which had been “my dream” for a long time. I wanted to make myself the best candidate that I could be. I thought I wanted to go to medical school because I wanted to help people and I was passionate about healthcare. But a larger reason was that I had started on the path and I didn’t want to give up.

Tenacity, in this way, can sabotage your ability to tell the truth to yourself. The more willing you are to endure pain for a goal, the more blinded you may be to signals from your heart telling you whether or not you should be pursuing that goal. Hardworking and driven people often conflate unhappiness with laziness. In this way, they end up working very hard to pursue goals that don’t make them happy because they believe they are avoiding laziness.

I was living with one roommate at the time and she had gone away for the weekend. I have no memories of this, but when I went back to the scene of the crime, I put the clues together. I had fainted one morning, likely from the exhaustion of the masochistic schedule I had sadistically inflicted upon myself, and cracked my skull on the floor. I had, somehow, regained consciousness, called 911, and then fainted again.

Had I not regained consciousness and called an ambulance, or if my phone had not been charged and nearby, I think I would have continued to bleed from my head and would have been found on Monday.

It is uncertain in what state I would have been found.

My mom drove to my university town and picked me that evening from the hospital. She didn’t let me take any of my books home with me. I had had a concussion and was instructed not to read, write, listen to music, watch tv, talk or sleep too much. At first I was annoyed that this would ruin my study schedule, but as I lay in my pink bedroom at home, with the curtains drawn and in complete silence, all I could do was think.

I thought about what I had almost missed by dying. I would have missed falling in love, getting married, having my own babies, travelling to see real art museums in Europe, painting magnificent things, writing a children’s book, swimming in the ocean again, going to an Opera…and most importantly, my mind kept coming back to the idea that I would have never had a chance to be a mother.

I always knew that I wanted to have my own family, but I didn’t know just how much it mattered to me. I cried and cried like I had been given another life.

It was the first time in my life that I did nothing for weeks and didn’t distract my mind with some project or book. The entire two weeks when I was laying in my room alone, I never once thought about medical school or wanting to be a doctor. It didn’t make me feel sad.

I realized that, in fact, becoming a doctor would sabotage many of the things that I really DID care about. A doctor has far less time to spend with her family, female doctors constantly complain that they miss many milestones in their children’s lives if they do have them. I would not have time to pursue my hobbies and interests like paintings, reading and travelling; doctors are notorious for their poor work-life balance. Many female medical professionals say that it is feminist to assume that women want to take on more of the childcare roles in a relationships and that the father should equally help so that it doesn’t “sabotage her career”.

But I don’t care if my babies sabotage my career. I *want* to take on these childcare roles. I want to spend my days kissing cheeks and coming up with entertainment and snacks rather than making power points, or giving sick people more medications to bandaid their chronic illnesses. It’s not society telling me that I want to take care of babies, it’s my own heart. In fact, society and *feminism* was telling me to REJECT my heart’s true desire this whole time.

Nearly dying killed my inner girlboss. It put everything into perspective. I didn’t want to win awards, get glamorous accolades, or “respect and status” from my career. These things were not what I was thinking about when I was reflecting on my death. Looking at my death in the eyes, feeling its cold hands graze my skin as it looked back at me, I found the truth about my own desires.

The only thing that matters to me is building my family, becoming a wife, a mother, an artist and living with virtue and dignity.

Most of our desires are what others have told us to want. As cliche as it sounds, I wanted to become a doctor because of the logic that an intelligent woman shouldn’t “waste her talents” and is obligated to use them for the world. I certainly didn’t want my gifts to be a “waste”. Many intelligent women are told this. But why is it a waste to use your intelligence and gifts to serve your own family? Why is it a waste to use them in ways that make you happy?

This is the psychological operation of feminism. Talented women waste their talents if they don’t make any money from them. If they use them solely for their own happiness, or for the benefit of their families, then of course, it sabotages the potential for corporations to make money from them. Do you think feminism came from women? No, it comes from corporations who can’t stand that a certain segment of the population might exist that can’t help them make profits.

The “Girlboss” is the mask that talented, intelligent and driven women are manipulated into wearing by a society that pushes us at every turn to crave status over happiness. Company over family. Money over love.

That day I killed my girlboss. There is a crescent shaped scar on the side of my skull where she left.

I no longer care what other people think about how I should spend my life, or about impressing others with my “achievements”. When you’re dying, you’re not thinking about your resume. You’re thinking about your true desires, and whether or not you got to taste them while you lived.

Don’t believe me? Go look in the eyes of the angel of death, and read the truth yourself.