I Googled \"How to Find Myself\" at 2am in a Hospital Call Room

I didn't set out to start a community. I set out to remember myself.

It happened in the middle of a 28-hour PICU shift. I had just intubated a baby. The adrenaline was making me sick, and I slipped into the call room and sat down on that twin bed, staring at the blank wall in the pitch black. I felt hollow in a way I couldn't name. And in that quiet, something hit me: I was finally a doctor. I had done exactly what I set out to do. And I had no idea who I was.

Not outside of the pager. Not outside of charting and rounding and calling consults at 3am. Not outside of the role I had been building toward my entire life.

So I did the most millennial thing imaginable.

I pulled out my phone and Googled: "how to find myself, woman."

Medical training is incredibly good at one thing: building a physician. It is not particularly interested in what happens to the person in the process.

The years of residency, the overnight calls, the constant performance of competence, the learning to keep it together no matter what, the culture that quietly rewards you for needing nothing, feeling nothing, asking for nothing. It is not a conspiracy. It is just the water we swim in. And over time, "later" becomes a life. Eat later. Sleep later. Feel later. Decompress later. Figure out who you are later.

I had been doing that for years. And that night in the call room, "later" had run out.

The disconnection I felt wasn't a crisis exactly. It was quieter than that. More like a slow leak. I was competent, dependable, good at my job. I had done hard things and made it through. But somewhere in the training, the parts of me that weren't physician had gotten pressed very, very flat.

And I hadn't noticed until I was sitting alone in the dark wondering what was left.

That Google search led me somewhere I never expected: The Wild Woman Project, and a mountaintop retreat with 150 women I had never met.

I went. And it was nothing like a conference. Nobody was presenting. Nobody was networking. Nobody was building a CV or checking a box.

What I found there was something medicine had slowly, methodically pressed out of me: honest reflection, real laughter, women holding space for each other without trying to fix anything. I learned to sit with grief and gratitude in the same breath. I learned that "the strong one" and "the whole one" are not the same thing. I learned that healing is a lot easier when you are not doing it alone in a call room in the dark.

Those experiences carried me through some of the hardest chapters of my life. Narcolepsy and night shifts. Infertility. Pediatric deaths that left marks I didn't know how to talk about. The disorienting sensation of being needed by everyone while feeling genuinely unknown, even to myself.

And out of all of it, a question kept surfacing: why didn't we have something like this, specifically for us?

When I say "a different kind of space," I mean something specific.

Women physicians aren't just carrying patients and teams. We're carrying identities, families, fertility decisions, the invisible labor of being the strong one in every room. We're navigating systems that weren't designed with us in mind and showing up anyway. We're googling "leave medical career" at midnight and then walking in the next morning like nothing happened.

Community helps, but only the right kind. A room full of people who already know what prior authorization feels like, what a 28-hour shift does to your body and your sense of self, why you can't really explain any of it to someone who wasn't there. A room where we don't have to translate ourselves before we can start talking.

Human beings, as a general rule, do better when they feel genuinely seen. Our nervous systems settle in safe company. We think more clearly. We take off the mask. We breathe like a person again.

That's not a nice-to-have extra. That's something that protects us.

After that retreat, I trained. I studied. I started facilitating women's circles and sitting with women through hard things, because I knew from the inside how much it mattered to not sit with hard things alone.

And eventually, I stopped wondering if someone else was going to build the space women physicians needed and started building it myself.

Women Physicians Collective is a physicians-only membership community built for reconnection. To self, to purpose, to each other. Monthly CME that actually nourishes you. Workshops. A private community that doesn't require you to explain your world before you can be understood in it. A place where we start at real.

If that's what you've been looking for, you're in the right place. Learn more about our membership here, or join the newsletter, Notes from the Call Room, for stories, shifts, and honest thoughts from the middle of this work.