Hi everyone, so excited to start my blog as Frameshift Coaching. I will be doing this every 2 weeks and look forward to hearing any comments, suggestions. I’ll keep it initially in Facebook but for my luddite sense of sanity will move things onto my website frameshiftcoaching.com
A huge component of “finding my way back” from severe burnout as a kidney doctor was understanding that
the white coat was just one of my identities.
Most importantly the white coat wasn’t even my authentic self.
Being a healer was.
As a young girl, my mom would dress me like a porcelain doll -lace tights, ruffled underwear, corkscrew curls. My room was filled with these dolls – which I hated. It symbolized everything that I was forced to be. Their lifeless, dead eyes made sense for horror movies, not soulmates. Barbies were even worse. As a burgeoning doctor, her feet never made sense to me and she didn’t look at all like any woman I had ever met or seen. But…her clothes, oh yes! That was heaven. I organized and re-organized all her clothes, shoes and a myriad of accessories for hours. Her uniforms echoed that of the world around me but they were better- cuter, always with matching shoes and more importantly, so interchangeable. Barbie was a surgeon one minute, astronaut the next, financial wizard the next- the options were endless.
Somehow I realized at 5 years old that the clothes did make the woman. That the uniform changed your, and more importantly for a young Latina, the world’s perspective. I wore suits, heels and a briefcase to college-not because I was that put together but because I wanted to be. The white coat I put on in med school was okay but that long white coat, the one that announced you were a Doctor. That coat was magic.
It took me a long time to realize that the white coat was just an identity and that I was much more than a white coat. That white coat was so deeply embedded onto me-it was crazy glued on. In spite of the fact that the way I was approaching being a doctor was physically, emotionally and mentally killing me, I couldn’t fathom being able to take it off. It took severe, active and unrelenting multiple sclerosis and subsequent depression to bring me to the crossroads of either leaving medicine OR reframing my idea of what the white coat identity meant and who I truly was.
What uniform are you wearing that you can’t remove?