Somewhere along the way, you stopped being you.
I was the girl who jumped off the bridge into the lake just because it was summer. The one who made a fort on my neighbor’s 20 acres of farmland. The one who danced like it was the most natural thing in the world.
You didn’t decide to leave your inner child behind. But you did decide to get on the train.
And once you’re on the train to becoming a doctor, the tracks are immovable. You don’t get to shift off of them often. They were built before you arrived, and they will still be there long after you’ve gone through. What they don’t tell you is what you’ll leave behind.
Today’s episode is about going home. Not literally. But back in time. Back to the parts of yourself that your years in medicine buried. And what happens when you realize they’re still there, just waiting.
The Invisible Cost of the Physician Training Track on Women Doctor Leaders
Here’s what I want you to understand about this medical track: it wasn’t designed with you in mind.
Not you specifically. Not women. Not anyone who had an individuality outside of medicine.
The track was built around a single goal: produce a competent physician. And it does that. It does it by selecting for and rewarding certain traits — perfectionism, compliance, the ability to subordinate your own needs to the demands of the system — and then rewarding those traits, consistently, for a decade.
Those traits helped you succeed. They also quietly crowded out everything else.
I know you know what got crowded out.
You may have missed your cousin’s wedding because your schedule couldn’t flex.
The dancing stops. The hiking trails go dormant. The adventurous parts of you learn to wait. And then they simply stay quiet.
In medical school, a classmate of mine got married and had her first baby — and it was treated like an oddity, even though it would have been completely unremarkable in any other context. So many of the rest of us put these personal pursuits off in order to more easily stay on track.
Here’s what gets me: most of the time, we don’t even notice this happening. That’s the wound. Not that our childhood and personal passions were stepped on — but that they disappeared so gradually we could barely feel them leaving.
A Moment That Stopped Me: Rediscovering Identity After Medical Training
A few years ago, a good friend told me: “You’re the most adventurous woman I know.”
We had just finished a zipline course in a giant rock quarry with our boys. And her words really surprised me.
Because I didn’t see myself as adventurous anymore. Somewhere in the 25 years between the bridge jumping and that rock quarry, I had stopped thinking of myself that way. The woman who grew up with 20 acres to roam, who built forts and skated frozen ponds — she had become very quiet.
I’ve thought about that moment a lot.
- What it meant that I didn’t recognize myself in her description.
- And what it meant that she saw it anyway.
That’s what this path to becoming a physician and physician leader does. It doesn’t erase you. It just muffles you until you have the wherewithal to unmuffle.
Sometimes it takes someone who is looking straight at you to say: she’s still in there.
A similar feeling came up for me when I went line dancing for my birthday recently.
I hadn’t really danced in years. And what I felt wasn’t just joy — it was something more specific. It was the physical experience of moving to the music. And also remembering that it is okay to miss a step.
In line dancing, you switch directions, you miss steps, you’re not going to get every beat right on the first pass. And it doesn’t matter. You keep moving. The failure feels like fun because everyone around you is dancing too.
Then another adventurous opportunity showed up for me when I recently got a hydrofoil for my birthday. If you don’t know what that is: it’s a surfboard that soars above the water. I’ve been learning to use it out in front of our home, and every time I do, I think: a teenage version of me would absolutely be doing this.
That’s what going home feels like. Not nostalgia. But reclamation.
So, yes, I’ve been slowly but surely adding a more adventurous version of myself back into my everyday life. And I love it. It brings my heart back home.
How Women Physician Leaders Can Reconnect With Who They Were Before Medicine
So I’d like to ask you a simple question: What did you love to do as a child?
Not what you were good at. Not what your parents valued. What did you choose, freely, when no one was keeping score?
Because here’s what I’ve come to believe:
the things we loved before medicine built our foundation.
Before perfectionism was a survival strategy. Before fitting inside the box was the only way forward. Before the straight track to doctoring.
That foundation is still there. Your core values didn’t disappear. They just got buried under years of becoming who the system needed you to be.
The move here is to bring one sliver of it back. Intentionally. Not as a grand reinvention. Just as a small, recurring act of returning to yourself.
You don’t need a dramatic change. You don’t need to rebuild your whole life. You need one thing that makes you feel like the version of you that existed before.
And when you find it — dancing, hiking, drawing, being outside, learning something new — it won’t just bring you joy. It will ground you. It will regulate you. It will lighten the load of everything else you’re carrying.
Because that’s what your origin story has always been trying to tell you. The foundation you were standing on before medicine is still there, just a bit dormant.
One Question for Women Physician Leaders Ready to Come Home to Themselves
So here’s what I’d like you to do after this episode.
Spend a little time with this question:
- What did I love to do as a kid?
- And how could I bring even a small piece of that into my life right now?
Not next year. Not after the next promotion. Now.
You don’t have to build a career around it. You don’t have to make it into anything big. You just have to choose it. Once. And see what happens.
If you’re sitting with this and realizing the distance feels bigger than one question can bridge — that’s exactly what I do in coaching.
We find what’s underneath, we name it, and we build a path to the life you actually want. If you’re ready to start that work, apply to work with me at womenmdleaders.com/work-with-stephanie.
Thanks so much for listening and thank you for leading with heart.