Shade

I can’t believe it you guys! I am nearing the end of my first semester as a medical student. It’s been pretty tough but I’m glad I took the transition well. There have been people who have already dropped out or left for “medical reasons.” But I’m one of the lucky few who still stands and I’m just hoping finals doesn’t knock me back on my butt.

But I’m here to talk to you about something that has been affecting students across the globe, it’s an epidemic that has to stop and I’m glad that pop culture has finally assigned a word to it: shade.

Definition taken from urban dictionary :

Shade: acting in a casual or disrespectful manner towards someone/dissing a friend

“throwing shade, acting kinda shady”

Rihanna is famous for it, but the originators were definitely overly competitive students. Let me explain.

A while back, I mentioned to you guys how I met a couple of people at the airport on my layover to get here. We ended up starting a facebook group chat so that we can keep each other in the loop and maybe pass around a few files or useful youtube videos that we have come across. I’m pretty anti-social but this type of communication was no problem for me.

Anyway, fast forward a few weeks after midterms and I had gotten my hands on some old notes from an upperclassmen and I thought they were pretty useful so I shared them onto our group google drive. Sharing is caring right? We aren’t graded on a curve, so everyone elses’ performance has no bearing on mine – so there’s no need to withhold information or tools if I feel like it’s going to help people out.

So I’m adding the file to the google drive and I look off to the side in the “activity” bar to make sure my file got uploaded and I see that a few files were recently added and I got excited because they looked like practice questions that would help for our upcoming finals, but when I finished reading the name of the file I saw my name underneath it with a clean line swept across it…..what?

So what that means is that they restricted access to viewing the file to everyone BUT me. My confusion led to anger which then promptly led to me feeling really hurt by this. I thought we were all friends (hell, I was even just speaking to them just the other day – they were cool as cucumbers). I’m one to choose my friends wisely and this felt like one of those times where I chose wrong.

This just felt like ultimate shade. All I do is eat, sleep, study, repeat. When did I have time to offend you or have you lose trust in our friendship in that time span? But, I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. And not wanting the bitterness to build up inside of me, I confronted her and just asked if maybe something had happened that maybe I wasn’t aware of. If it was something I did, I surely would want to apologize for it.

She looked at me, shot me a quick smile and said “oh! sorry! It must have done that automatically…so weird!”

I think that was the moment I decided that this friendship was over. When I uploaded files to the google drive, restricting access was something I had to do manually. It hurts being lied to, but I wasn’t going to pursue people who aren’t worth it. I give everyone 1 strike, and if they blow it then I cut ties. Don’t waste my time.

We’re in medical school, you’re stressed, I’m stressed, you want to do well, so do I…I get it, I really do. But I don’t think that trying to crawl your way to the top by stepping on others is the way to go. It says a whole lot about you without you having to speak, and it’s not something I’d agree with. When I got my hands on the useful notes, I had zero reservations and would be willing to give it to anyone. We’re all in this together, shouldn’t we start acting like it?

Or is that type of attitude dead? I guess so.

TenaciousMD