Photo cred: Pooja Lakshmin, Orsa Maggiore Hostel Rome
In the summer of 2016, I graduated psychiatry residency from George Washington University and got a job offer to join the faculty as a supervisor in the Five Trimesters Perinatal Psychiatry Clinic and as Associate Program Director of the Psychiatry Residency Program. It was, in essence, my dream job.
In academics, there really is no such thing as negotiating salary. But, I took a risk and I asked to start my job a month late— in August instead of July.
I spent the month of July living in Rome at a hostel inside the city and in an AirBnb on the outskirts. As a newly minted faculty, it was a daring act to tell my department that I would be off for the busiest month of the academic year (July in medicine is when all of the new residents start) and take this sabbatical. I took an Italian language class (sadly, I did not hold on to a lick…), tried to write, and made my rounds to all the tourist sights.
But, something strange kept happening. Every time I’d pick out a nice-ish restaurant from my Lonely Planet, and show up at dinner time asking for a table of one, I’d get turned away. It was a little weird, but I chalked it up to the fact that maybe it was not worth it to seat one person alone at a restaurant.
Then towards the end of my trip, I was at the market near my Airbnb, where I had previously chatted with some of the store owners. I was strolling the stalls when someone started aggressively shooing me away. Quickly, one of the shopkeepers I had met came up behind me and shouted “No no — don’t worry, she’s American.”
I was still confused. I vividly remember calling my partner, J, and telling him what happened. “They thought you were Roma” he explained. “Be careful.”
After I got back to DC, I had lunch with my former supervisor from The McClendon Center, a community psychiatry clinic in Washington. I told him about what happened, and he said, “They didn’t see you as a doctor. They saw you as a young, brown woman.”
I chose to be a psychiatrist because I wanted to help others carry the burden of being on the outside - whether their outsider status was because of how their brains worked, their circumstances, their gender, their skin color, or some combination of these factors.
But, how much of what I’ve set out to achieve in the world is to make up for the belonging I was not afforded from the get go?