What It’s Like….I miss Chicago, aka another life of a FGLI student rant

I have 4 other drafts in progress but as I predicted on my twitter last night, I am going to ignore those drafts and write about something different.

Currently, I am quarantining because after 2.5 years, I got COVID. I’ve been very lucky to have only a wet cough and sneezing/stuffy nose (so if you haven’t gotten vaccinated or boosted, please do so because even as someone who was double boosted because of clinical shadowing, this virus still hit me pretty hard), though I am currently suffering from extreme boredom from watching The Sopranos and Youtube non-stop.

But, when I’m not losing my mind watching something on my laptop or phone, I’ve been chatting with my friends and also with myself.

In 9 days, it will be exactly one year since I moved to San Francisco. My life is pretty different from last year. I’ve gained some new friends and have lost some friends as well. I’ve been on a journey working through my mental health, trying to heal as I was frankly a very damaged person post college. I’m also currently studying for the MCAT, working on many different projects in my lab and preparing to take my final science pre-req before I apply for medical school in May 2023.

About a month after I moved San Francisco, I wrote a mini blog that was both a love letter to my new home and a farewell to the city I’d left behind. I thought I was going to be okay when I moved to San Francisco. That yes, I was going to miss Chicago, but I was ready to leave and start a new life.

Now, nearly one year later, I miss Chicago more than ever. But for a different reason I've talked about before.

I miss my FGLI family.

In one of my previous blogs, I talked a bit about the difference in being a FGLI student in the college setting versus the real world.

“And I'm in the real world too. Yes the world of science and academia is a niche don’t get me wrong, but I’m working a full-time job as a scientist, taking classes and trying to study for orgo and in about two months, the MCAT, while living in my own apartment—not a dorm. I’m not at UChicago. I’m not in college where I can go hang out with some of my FGLI friends that live in my same dorm or are a five minute walk from me. I’m not in a space where there are 500-1000 people who I can find who share aspects of my life. I’m lucky if I even find one person now who shares the experience of being FGLI and the emotions that brings—and that they’re a five minute walk from my lab. And that’s another layer of loneliness that has really set in.”

When I moved to San Francisco, I said goodbye to my Oddysey Scholar, Questbridge and Greenhouse Scholar community; communities full of FGLI students like me and were instrumental in honestly getting me to San Francisco. One of my closest FGLI friends that I’m fortunate to have around me (Hi Gabe <3), told me about UCSF’s post bacc program and is ultimately the reason why I’m here and getting to do the amazing research I get to do now. But of all the friends from Chicago that are here in SF with me, they’re the only one who identifies as FGLI and shared a lot of the same struggles and journey. And Palo Alto is a 50 minute drive from SF so it’s not like we can see each other very often (or any of my other Chicago friends that are now based in the Bay).

And that’s it. That sense of community, that easy access to my FGLI community. I don’t have that anymore. Yes, I have my phone, my social media, but I’ve missed seeing my FGLI community in person. And I didn’t realized how much I missed that and needed that. When I returned to San Francisco after visiting Chicago back in May, I cried on the plane. I didn’t do that when I had left Chicago for the first time last august. But on this last flight, I most certainly did. I didn’t want to leave and I honestly thought about changing my flight to try to stay an extra week, because I wanted to hold onto the community of people that meant the world to me a bit longer.

But, I came back to San Francisco, and came back to a world where yes, even in college I was aware that I was a “minority”, but in San Francisco, the word and status of being a minority was an understatement to how I’ve been feeling.

I felt lonely. I felt like I didn’t belong in this city, in this academic space that I’m trying my best to grow in.

And I think that is what scares me: that at each stage in my career, the amount of students that look like me and come from backgrounds like me is going to decrease, to where at some point, when I use the word “I”, I really mean “I”. Singular. That I will be the only person who is FGLI. And that’s really scary.

And in a career path that can be really draining because of how "singular” I often feel, I think i’m starting to realize how scared I am of that. I’m scared. I don’t want to be alone. To fight my own battles. I want my community to be in the same room as me, not 40, 500, 1000, or 3000+ miles away.

And look, I have a lot of amazing friends who are not FGLI who I have so much trust and love for, and they’ve shown and have stuck up for me. I know that in reality, and honestly I feel like this is out of luck, I will always have people who don’t share my identities on my side and will protect me, and I am so, so grateful for that. But it doesn’t take away the loneliness I feel when there are certain conversations or interactions or viewpoints that they have, that I just don’t have.

Because being FGLI isn’t just an identity I tick off on a box to get extra financial aid. It is my life. It has defined the way I live, the way I see the world and how I interact with it. It’s a unique paradigm with many nuances and subtleties that I’ll never be able to fully explain.

I do love San Francisco, I really do. But I also, really, really miss Chicago. And that’s okay. It’s okay that I feel this way and that I’m allowing myself to feel this way too. I’m not ignoring the pain, the loss, the guilt, the fear, anything. I’m accepting it because it’s how I’m going to survive in this world.

So yeah, I miss Chicago, I miss my family, my friends, my boyfriend, and the communities of people that kept me afloat and got me to where I am now. But they’re not gone. They’re not. And I’m holding onto that too. Even if they’re not a 300 feet walk from me anymore, they’re still a text message, a tweet, a story post or a phone call away.

And I’m never going to take that for granted.