COM Outlook Winter 2021

18 | DR. KIRAN C. PATEL COLLEGE OF OSTEOPATHIC MEDICINE I wonder if you know how it feels to bite your tongue as the patient asks you what you are. It feels sharp, tastes acidic. I wonder if you know how it feels to hold your smile in place as the physician you work for tugs at your hijab and laughs. It feels humorless, like a taut string. I wonder if you know how it feels to be speechless when the nurse you work with tells you all Brown skin looks the same— a little dark, a little dirty. It feels like every other day—a little hopeless. It feels like shock when I listen to my professor tell me I’ll never get into medical school writing about bitter things like racism and Islamophobia. She tells me she knows best, having been on admis- sions committees, that I should be less sensitive if I want to succeed. It feels like a rock, jagged and ugly, lodged in my throat, because I know. I already know. I was careful with my words, but looking at her face, a little annoyed, a little like she knew what she was doing to me, I realized I wasn’t careful enough, that for some, nothing will ever be enough. I wonder if you know how it felt to sit there, refusing to cry, as she belittled the worst moments of my life. It feels like resignation when I show up to my first day of work and spend all day repeating that I wear my hijab because I want to—a novel concept apparently—that a woman of color can choose her own attire. My coworkers tell each patient that isn’t it a surprise I was born here, that I don’t have an accent. I laugh, the one I practiced, and wish they would just say it. What makes me less American in their eyes that they never look past my hijab is my skin. I wonder how long until I can go home and stop listening to them explain Islam to me. I wonder if you know how that feels, to be talked down to like a child about something you know better than anyone. It feels like anger when I see it doesn’t have to be this hard, that not everyone has to wonder if there is a place for them. It feels like maybe I’m deluding myself when I say this is worth it, when I think about a decade more of keeping my mouth shut. It feels like hurt that the career I love does not love me, that the patients I fight for do not fight for me. But I think that I cannot give up, because, one day, I will be in a position that cannot be silenced. One day, I will be someone patients who look like me can trust. One day, a student will see a Muslim, South Asian American woman in a white coat and think that there is a place for her. I wonder how that will feel. Zehra Rizvi is a first-year KPCOM student. BY ZEHRA RIZVI feels like today It feels like hurt that the career I love does not love me, that the patients I fight for do not fight for me.