"Overachiever"

After my last anatomy exam, I had a conversation with Alex about how the exam went. (You may remember my mention of this rather fetching young fellow intermittently on my blog for the past four years...four years, ladies and gentlemen, hold your applause.) I had done fairly well, and when I told Alex my score he chided me (good-naturedly): “overachiever.”

My attempt to give a light-hearted, nonchalant answer completely failed, and I proceeded to be silent for the next minute or so while I tried to figure out what exactly was bothering me.

I have been called an “overachiever” in my life more times than I can count. I honestly can’t remember how often the term has been lobbed at me in jest; what I can say is that sometimes it has bothered me, and other times it hasn’t.

Regardless of the times I have been able to shrug it off or laugh about it, I have to admit that the term “overachiever” has a bit of a sting to it. It is certainly not a compliment. The word “over-” implies “excess,”  “unnecessary,” and “superfluous.” It is a hand-wave to a silly and compulsive tendency. The overachievers are the ones who work themselves into a tizzy (for no seemingly valid reason) while the sane and reasonable ones –the ones who know how to prioritize—sit back and grin at them in knowing amusement.

The first time I can remember being bothered by the name was when it was applied to me—rather matter-of-factly, now that I think of it—by a guy that I was pretty head-over-heels for in high school. I don’t quite remember the course of the conversation that led up to it (this was my freshman year), but I do remember that it was a response to his own performance in light of my own. I was a straight-A student, he was not. Of course, there was no reason for this to reflect poorly on his work ethic, because my grades were the product of a character trait that was very easily dismissed. Overachiever.

To wrap up the Alex story (and in his defense before I move on to my diatribe), I admit that I harbor a bit of a chip on my shoulder from those in high school who treated my studying tendencies as something exasperating or undesirable, somewhat akin to an utter lack of fashion style or social ineptitude (i.e. my volleyball coach rolling his eyes at me while I was trying to do my homework on a Friday afternoon, sighing, “Put it away, Sarah.”) Alex was teasing (as I hear significant others are occasionally prone to do), but I bristled nonetheless. Segue to apologetics.

For us “overachievers”...what exactly sets this “bar of sufficiency” that we overshoot to become not “achievers,” but “overachievers”? Is it the average performance of our peers? The minimum required to achieve our personal goals? The world would be a pretty dismal place if everyone strove to vacate the high end of the bell curve; we’d be saying goodbye to scientific breakthroughs, philosophical treatises, social revolutions. And when it comes to personal goals, I am almost certain that I would not be where I am right now if I hadn’t worked as hard as I did in high school and college. Apparently my work efforts were just right, and I am exactly where I want to be.

It is a shame that there is any stigma attached to a strong work ethic in itself. I make the "in itself" qualification because I am very much aware that tunnel-vision and selfish ambition—occasional by-products of a strong drive to succeed—can have some negative consequences. I recognize that at times, my desire to do well in academics cultivated behaviors that stifled my social life, damaged my emotional and physical health, and strained some relationships.  I’m working on that. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Please, please, please recognize my accomplishments for what they are. Accomplishments come when you work for them. And work is hard.

Everyone derives a sense of satisfaction from something. I work hard for two reasons: first, I am often truly engaged in what I am learning, and second, I choose to derive satisfaction from my accomplishments. I fail to see how this is any worse than deriving satisfaction from a night on the town, or from one’s physical attractiveness, or from fancy cuisine. I think that it’s part of human nature to be proud of our creations and our abilities. I have the feeling that, if it weren’t, we wouldn’t have Beethoven’s symphonies, or Michelangelo’s sculptures.

I’m going to make a bold assertion here, and that is that those who wave around the term “overachiever” in an attempt to be dismissive are those who refuse to acknowledge the value of working hard for the sake of working hard. I won’t delve any further than that, but I will say this: suppose my volleyball coach or my high-school crush were rushed into an emergency room for some fun emergency surgery and had the privilege of choosing their own physician.  Given the choice between an overachiever and your average Joe, you can bet your balls that they’re going to choose the overachiever.

Once upon a time, you were nothing but a cell—a tiny sac of fluid, filled with nothing but globs of protein and 46 strings of deoxyribonucleic acid (23 from your mother, 23 from your father). You were no bigger than the size of the period at the end of this sentence.  Then you started to divide, cleaving over and over, until you looked like a microscopic raspberry. Like origami or play-dough, you twisted and you folded, invaginated and budded, rolled and flattened. You transformed from little more than a hollow tube to a multi-chambered, multi-organed being with a beating heart, an impulse-firing brain, and a set of lungs waiting for their first breath of oxygen. All from one little cell.

For the past ten weeks, I spent three hours a day with a scalpel in one hand and my dissector in the other, chasing down tangles of arteries and nerves and separating muscles from fascia. It is, in fact, illegal to cut open a human body unless you are medical student. Dissection is a privilege that few people have. I don’t believe that the stigma of slicing through skin or sawing through bone is simply the product of our squeamish natures; there is something forbidding about violating our exteriors. We don’t even like to impinge on personal space. To take apart a body is, in a way, to reduce who and what we are to a series of moving parts. Sure, we’ve read in biology that the heart pumps blood or that the brain sends electrical impulses to our arms and legs. We’ve glanced at pictures. We’ve watched Discovery. But to actually cut...to be the one to delve from the outside in...that’s different. We start by staring the wizard in the face and proceed to find the man behind the curtain, and we fear that the magic will disappear.

A week before the end of anatomy, I pushed a bone-saw through the circumference of a skull, opening the calvaria like the lid of a cookie jar. I cut through cranial nerves that snaked through the grooves and holes of the skull and lifted a brain into my hands. It weighed about as much as an eggplant, and the sulci felt like boiled eggs through my nitrile gloves. I examined the optic nerves, two fibers that looked not unlike two strands of linguini. I looked up, took in the colors of the room, the shapes, the textures—the subjective experience of seeing—and looked back at those little linguini strands. I could not put the two together. It made the hair on my arms stand on end.

We are amazing works of art. I don’t know how we got here...but I don’t need to know. Seeing it all is enough to leave me floored with wonder, and to appreciate just how incredible life is.

I thanked my favorite professor after our last anatomy lecture today. I told him how grateful I was that the faculty was so attentive, passionate, and invested in their medical students. When he told me, “Well, you made it easy,” he had tears in his eyes. Then he gave me a hug.

I’m in the right place.