Pink, Forensic Pathology, and Becoming the Doctor I Want to Be

I am Probably Not What You Picture

Whenever someone asks what kind of doctor I want to be, I can almost predict how the conversation is going to go.

Before I even answer, people will sometimes try to guess.

For some reason, I apparently give off very strong plastic surgery or pediatrics energy.

And honestly? I can see how we got there.

Maybe it is the pink. Maybe it is the bows. Maybe it is the fact that I genuinely enjoy getting dressed in the morning and will absolutely coordinate my accessories with an outfit that is about to spend the majority of its day sitting in a lecture hall. Whatever it is, people tend to take one look at me and think, "Oh, definitely peds. Maybe plastics."

And then I tell them: “I want to be a forensic pathologist.”

Usually, there is a tiny pause.

Sometimes a slightly concerned look.

And then comes some variation of: “So…you want to do autopsies?”

Yes.

Yes, I do.

I realize this may not have been where you thought the conversation was going.

There is something objectively hilarious to me about how consistently my appearance seems to throw people off. Apparently, somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that a woman who loves pink, fashion, makeup, and anything remotely feminine probably wants a specialty to match the aesthetic.

Meanwhile, I have been over here thinking, "Okay, but have you considered forensic pathology?"

Because yes, I own an unreasonable number of pink things. I love fashion and makeup. My study supplies somehow always end up color-coordinated. I will spend twenty minutes deciding what to wear somewhere that I will be sitting down for 90% of the time, and I have never met a tiny feminine detail that I did not at least consider adding to something.

And I also find forensic pathology completely fascinating.

When most people picture forensic pathology, I do not think they are imagining someone particularly feminine. The mental image is usually something much darker and more serious: stainless steel, fluorescent lighting, scrubs, gloves, an autopsy table, and probably someone who looks like they have not seen sunlight since residency.

Then there is me.

I can be discussing mechanisms of disease one minute and deciding whether an outfit needs different jewelry the next. I can get genuinely excited about histology and then become equally excited because something comes in the perfect shade of pink. My career goals involve death investigation, autopsies, pathology, and eventually spending a significant amount of my life around microscopes.

Meanwhile, the name of my blog is quite literally Forensic Fashionista.

Subtle.

But the longer I have been in medicine, the more I have started thinking about why those parts of me ever felt like they needed to be separated in the first place.

Because there is this strange thing that happens when you are becoming a doctor. Somewhere between learning how to take a history, putting on a white coat, and realizing that people are beginning to trust you with increasingly serious responsibilities, you start developing an idea of what a doctor is supposed to look like.

And I do not just mean physically.

You are supposed to be confident. Composed. Intelligent. Professional. Serious enough that people trust you. You start looking at the physicians around you and imagining the version of yourself who will eventually stand where they are standing.

And if you are anything like me, you occasionally wonder whether you need to change parts of yourself to get there. Maybe you need to dress differently or speak differently. Maybe you need to become a little more polished, a little more serious, a little less…you.

I think I have carried some version of that question with me for a long time.

What does the woman I want to become look like?

As I have gotten further into medicine, though, I think I have been asking the wrong question.

I am not sure I want to look like a doctor.

I want to look like myself as a doctor.

And there is a difference.

I do not want becoming a physician to feel like slowly sanding down all of the little pieces of myself until I fit whatever image I created in my head of what a serious doctor should be. I do not want to reach the career I have worked this hard for only to realize I spent the journey trying to become someone else's version of the person who belongs there.

I want the woman who eventually walks into an autopsy suite to still feel like me.

Now, to be very clear, I will not be performing autopsies accessorized with a tiny bow and coordinating kitten heels. There are limits. PPE does not care about the aesthetic. OSHA would probably like a word.

But underneath the gloves, the scrubs, the white coat, and all of the very practical realities of medicine, I do not think I have to leave the softer parts of myself at the door.

And maybe that is what I have started to realize about fashion, femininity, and this very unexpected career I have fallen in love with.

The goal was never to dress like the person I thought a doctor should be.

It is to become the doctor I want to be without losing the woman I already am.

Pink and Pathology Can Exist in the Same Room

For a long time, I think I subconsciously believed that becoming more professional meant becoming a little less visibly me.

And to be fair to younger me, that idea did not appear completely out of thin air.

No one ever sat me down and explicitly told me that pink was not professional or that caring about fashion somehow made me less serious about medicine. There was not a dramatic moment where someone confiscated my bows at the door and handed me a beige blazer in exchange.

It was much subtler than that.

Sometimes it was the way people responded to me before they knew anything about me. Sometimes it was a comment that probably seemed harmless to the person making it but landed differently when I was actively trying to be taken seriously. And yes, sometimes it came from men in professional spaces who seemed to make assumptions about me based on the way I looked before I ever had the opportunity to show them what I could do.

I remember experiencing this when I was working as a forensic technician before medical school. I was young, blonde, feminine, and entering spaces where I was often surrounded by people who were older and more experienced than I was. I was already very aware that I had a lot to learn, so I worked hard to be professional and prove that I deserved to be there.

During one interaction, a police officer repeatedly referred to me as “princess.”

Maybe to someone else, that sounds small. Maybe he even thought he was being funny.

But standing there trying to do my job, it did not feel particularly funny.

It felt demeaning.

I was not there as someone's princess. I was not there because I thought forensic medicine looked interesting on television. I was there to work, to learn, and to contribute in a professional environment that I took incredibly seriously.

And yet, before any of that seemed to matter, I had already been placed into a little box based on how I looked.

Those moments stick with you.

Not necessarily because one comment completely changes the way you see yourself, but because enough small experiences can start teaching you something without you realizing you are learning it. You start wondering whether you would be taken more seriously if you dressed differently. If you looked older. If you were less feminine. If you were quieter about the things you liked.

Maybe if there were a little less pink, people would see the professional part first.

And THAT is where I think my imaginary future-doctor uniform came from.

When I pictured the physician I would eventually become, she was very polished. Very composed. Very professional. Probably wearing tasteful neutrals. Her hair never had flyaways, she always knew exactly what to say, and she certainly was not standing in front of her closet before a clinical skills assessment thinking, "Okay, yes, I'm nauseous from anxiety, but which earrings are we wearing?"

She seemed lovely.

She also seemed a little boring.

Sorry, future me.

The problem was not that I genuinely believed wearing pink could make me less intelligent. I knew better than that. The problem was knowing that sometimes other people might make assumptions about me because of it.

And when you know that, there can be this temptation to get ahead of the judgment.

To make yourself look more serious before someone has the chance to assume you are not.

To tone something down before someone decides it is “too much.”

To make yourself slightly smaller, quieter, or more neutral because maybe then no one will have a reason to question whether you belong in the room.

But here is the thing I have started realizing: someone else's assumption about me is not evidence that there is something wrong with the way I exist in that space.

And frankly, I have spent far too much time studying to let a pink notebook become the downfall of my professional credibility.

Imagine it.

Years of medical school. Residency. Board exams. Thousands of hours of training.

“She was an excellent physician until we saw the pink notebook.”

Career over.

Pack it up.

The bow has gone too far.

When you actually say it out loud, the entire idea starts sounding as ridiculous as it is.

That does not mean bias or judgment suddenly stops existing. I know there may still be people who see a young woman who enjoys fashion, makeup, or femininity and make assumptions before she opens her mouth. I am not naïve enough to think a motivational speech about wearing pink magically fixes that.

What has changed is how much authority I want to give those assumptions over the person I am becoming.

Because professionalism and personality are not mutually exclusive.

And femininity is not something I should have to compensate for with extra seriousness just to prove that I deserve to be in the room.

Why Forensic Pathology, Anyway?

Once we get past the initial “Wait…you want to do autopsies?” portion of the conversation, there is usually another question waiting for me.

Why?

Which, honestly, is fair.

Forensic pathology is not exactly one of those careers that people hear about and immediately respond with, “Of course! How relaxing!”

But the truth is, the path that brought me here started long before medical school. Actually, it started long before I really understood what forensic pathology even was.

As a little kid, I was absolutely enthralled by forensic-themed television shows. And when I say enthralled, I mean enthralled. Other kids were watching cartoons, and I was perfectly content watching CSI with my parents and trying to understand how one tiny piece of evidence could completely change the story of what happened.

I loved all of it.

The fingerprints. The evidence. The mystery. The idea that there were answers hidden in tiny details if you just knew where and how to look for them.

Naturally, this fascination resulted in me stealing my mom's makeup brushes to dust for fingerprints around the house because apparently our home had become an active crime scene and I had been personally assigned to the investigation.

The number of crimes I solved was, unfortunately, zero.

The amount of my mother's makeup I probably ruined in the pursuit of justice? That is between me and the higher beings.

But somewhere underneath all of that childhood fascination was something that never really went away: I wanted to know why.

Why did this happen?

What does this piece of evidence mean?

What happened that we cannot immediately see?

At first, those questions existed in the world of forensics.

Then, when I was nine, they became painfully personal.

My cousin passed away from a brain tumor.

At nine years old, I obviously did not have the medical knowledge to understand everything that had happened. I just knew that someone I loved had been sick, there was something happening inside his brain that could not be fixed, and eventually he was gone.

And I wanted to understand why.

I wanted to understand what could happen inside the human body that could change a life so completely. I wanted to know what a brain tumor actually was, why it happened, why some could be treated and others could not, and how something happening on such a microscopic level could have consequences that enormous.

Those questions were different from the ones I had been asking while watching forensic shows.

But somehow, they came from the same place.

I wanted answers.

Losing him was what first pulled me toward medicine. The human body stopped being something abstract and became something I desperately wanted to understand. Medicine offered an entire world built around the questions I had been asking: what went wrong, why did it happen, and what can the body tell us about it?

For a while, though, I think forensics and medicine existed as two separate interests in my head.

I loved the investigative nature of forensic science.

And I loved the idea of becoming a physician and understanding disease.

Then I discovered forensic pathology.

And it was like someone had quietly taken two halves of my brain and introduced them to each other.

Wait.

You can do both?

You can be a physician and work in forensic investigation?

You can study disease and injury while also asking what happened and why?

You can use anatomy, pathology, toxicology, histology, medical history, and physical evidence to piece together a story?

Oh.

There I am.

Suddenly, the career I had been trying to imagine did not require me to choose between the two things that had shaped my interests for years.

Forensic pathology was their meeting point.

And once I had the opportunity to work in a medical examiner's office and see what forensic medicine actually looked like outside of television, that feeling only became stronger.

Unsurprisingly, the real thing looked very little like CSI.

There was no dramatic music. No perfectly timed revelation before a commercial break. Nobody dramatically removed their sunglasses and announced that they had solved the case.

Extremely disappointing.

What I found instead was quieter, more methodical, and infinitely more meaningful.

I found medicine and investigation existing in the same room.

And THAT was when I realized that what fascinated me as a child had grown into something much deeper.

Forensic pathology asks you to take everything you know about the human body: anatomy, physiology, disease, injury, pathology, and use it to reconstruct a story when the person in front of you can no longer tell you what happened.

Every detail matters.

External findings matter. Internal findings matter. Medical history matters. The circumstances surrounding the death matter. Toxicology can matter. Microscopic findings can matter. Sometimes something that initially seems insignificant becomes the piece that helps everything else make sense.

It is medicine with an investigative way of thinking woven through it.

You are constantly asking questions.

What happened here?

Does this injury explain the death?

Is this finding related or incidental?

Was there underlying disease?

Do the history, circumstances, and physical findings actually agree with one another?

And occasionally, I imagine, the human body responds with the medical equivalent of good luck, babe.

Which is exactly the kind of puzzle my brain loves.

But the more time I have spent around forensic medicine, the more I have realized that the puzzle itself is not the most important part.

The person is.

I think that can get lost when people talk about forensic pathology because death is naturally what makes the specialty seem unusual. People hear autopsy and immediately focus on the procedure. But a forensic pathologist is not simply examining a body.

They are examining someone.

Someone who had a name. Someone who had people they loved and people who loved them. Someone who had routines, plans, inside jokes, favorite foods, and probably at least one song they played an unreasonable number of times.

A whole life existed before that person ever became a case.

And maybe because my own path toward medicine began with losing someone I loved and desperately wanting answers, I do not think I will ever be able to separate that reality from the work.

Someone, somewhere, may be waiting for the answer to “why?”

I know what it feels like to have that question.

There is an incredible amount of trust involved in caring for someone after death. The person on the table cannot tell you where something hurts. They cannot clarify their history. They cannot advocate for themselves or correct an assumption.

You have to let the evidence speak for them.

And you have a responsibility to listen carefully.

That is one of the things I find most meaningful about forensic pathology: the opportunity to give someone a voice when they can no longer speak for themselves.

Sometimes that means identifying natural disease that no one knew was there. Sometimes it means carefully documenting injuries. Sometimes toxicology or microscopic examination provides information that could not be seen during the initial examination. Sometimes the answer is not immediate at all, and multiple pieces have to come together before the story becomes clear.

And sometimes the answer you provide matters deeply to the people who are still living.

Families may be waiting to understand why someone they love died. Public health systems rely on accurate death investigation. Legal systems may depend on careful medical interpretation. Patterns recognized through death investigation can reveal risks that affect entire communities.

Suddenly, the work becomes much bigger than the autopsy table.

That is the forensic pathology I fell in love with.

Not the sensationalized version. Not mysterious cases dramatically solved before lunch. And definitely not because I have some strange fascination with death itself.

I am fascinated by what the body can still teach us after death.

I am fascinated by the intersection of medicine and investigation. By the way pathology can explain something that was not obvious from the outside. By the responsibility of taking dozens of individual findings and carefully asking what they mean together.

And maybe most of all, I am drawn to the idea that there is still an opportunity to care for someone even when curing them is no longer possible.

The care simply looks different.

It looks like attention to detail. It looks like objectivity. It looks like respect. It looks like refusing to rush to an answer because someone's story deserves to be understood correctly.

I am still years away from becoming the forensic pathologist I hope to be. There is an enormous amount left for me to learn, and I am sure my understanding of this field will continue to evolve as I move through medical school and eventually into training.

But the more medicine I learn, the more excited I become about where I am headed.

Because now, when I learn about cardiovascular disease, neurologic injury, toxicology, infectious disease, or the microscopic changes caused by illness, I am not only learning it for the next exam.

I am slowly building the language I will someday use to understand someone's final story.

And maybe that is the simplest answer I can give when someone asks why I chose forensic pathology.

I started as a little girl who wanted to know what happened.

Then I became a nine-year-old who desperately wanted to understand why.

And somewhere along the way, I found a field that allows me to spend my life asking both.

There Is Nothing Fashionable About an Autopsy Suite

Despite the name Forensic Fashionista, I feel like I should clear something up before anyone gets the wrong idea.

There is absolutely nothing fashionable about an autopsy suite.

Like...nothing.

This is not the part of my future career where I will be expressing myself through a carefully curated outfit. There will be no autopsy OOTD. There will be no standing in front of the mirror thinking, "Hmm, does this PPE wash me out?" There will certainly be no tiny kitten heel peeking out underneath my scrubs.

At least, there better not be.

Because if there is one thing my time working in a medical examiner’s office taught me, it is that practicality wins. Every. Single. Time.

Hair? Back.

Shoes? Closed-toe and chosen with survival in mind.

Clothes? Whatever can comfortably exist underneath the layers of protective equipment you are about to put on.

And the overall aesthetic?

PPE chic.

It is very exclusive.

Very difficult to get into.

Mostly because getting into it requires approximately seventeen layers, and somehow, the second everything is finally on correctly, your nose will itch.

Medicine has a sense of humor like that.

When I first became interested in forensic medicine, I do not think I fully appreciated just how physical the work could be. Television gives us these beautifully lit autopsy suites where everyone somehow looks perfectly composed while delivering an incredibly insightful observation approximately thirty seconds into the examination.

Reality is considerably less cinematic.

You are standing for long periods of time. You are moving around. You are working with your hands. You are wearing protective equipment because, breaking news, the human body contains things that you would generally prefer remain off your clothing.

There are smells.

There are fluids.

There are moments when your hair absolutely does not look the way it did when you arrived that morning.

And absolutely nobody cares.

Honestly, I think that is one of the things I loved about working in that environment.

Once you are in the room, the work is the work.

It does not matter whether your outfit was cute before you put PPE over it. It does not matter whether your hair looked perfect that morning. It certainly does not matter whether your gloves coordinate with your personal color palette.

The priority is doing your job properly.

And there is something strangely freeing about that.

For someone who genuinely enjoys fashion and uses clothing as a form of self-expression, you would think an environment where almost all of that disappears would feel restrictive.

It never really did.

Because I did not stop being myself when I put on PPE.

I was still curious. Still detail-oriented. Still asking questions. Still excited to learn. Still occasionally having a tiny internal "oh my God, this is SO COOL" moment while maintaining what I desperately hoped was a normal and professional facial expression.

That last part required practice.

There were definitely moments early on when I had to remind myself that while I was fascinated by what I was seeing, this was not a fascinating science experiment.

This was a person.

And that distinction matters.

Working in forensic medicine taught me very quickly that curiosity and respect have to exist together. You can be fascinated by pathology, anatomy, disease, or an unusual finding while never forgetting that the reason you are able to learn from those things is because there is a human being in front of you.

That awareness changes the way you carry yourself.

The autopsy suite is not a place where I need to express my femininity through what I am wearing. It is not a place that needs to be made prettier or softer for me to feel comfortable in it. The environment serves a purpose, and when I am there, my responsibility matters infinitely more than my aesthetic.

That being said...

If pink scrubs are available?

I am wearing the pink scrubs.

Obviously.

And if I can find a cute pink scrub cap that keeps my hair exactly where it needs to be while also bringing me a tiny amount of joy underneath approximately seventeen layers of PPE?

We are wearing that too.

I said practicality comes first. I never said practicality had to be beige.

But that is probably about where we are drawing the line.

Pink scrubs? Absolutely.

Pink scrub cap? Delightful.

Bedazzled autopsy instruments?

Absolutely not.

There is a time and a place, babes.

And weirdly, I think realizing that has made me feel even more secure in my femininity, not just in the autopsy suite, but everywhere else too.

Because I have started understanding that self-expression does not mean I need to stamp my personality onto every single environment I enter. I do not need everything around me to visually reflect who I am in order to remain connected to that person.

Sometimes I can just...wear the PPE.

Revolutionary.

Granted, the PPE may be covering pink scrubs, but that is between me and the PPE.

I do not need every piece of equipment around me to match my personal color palette. I do not need a bow attached to something for people to know I am feminine. And I definitely do not need to introduce rhinestones anywhere near an autopsy suite.

Please confiscate the craft supplies if I ever suggest otherwise.

Who I am is not something that disappears the second the visual markers of it do.

And I think that is an important distinction when we talk about “bringing yourself” into medicine.

Being yourself does not mean making every space about you.

Sometimes being yourself means understanding exactly what a space requires of you and entering it appropriately without believing you have to become a different person to do so.

There are going to be environments throughout my career where practicality comes first. There will be situations that require seriousness, restraint, and an awareness that whatever is happening in front of me is infinitely more important than how I look while I am handling it.

I respect that.

Actually, I love that.

Because the goal was never to make forensic pathology fit my aesthetic.

The goal is to build a life where I fit into forensic pathology without having to erase myself to get there.

So no, the future Forensic Fashionista will probably not be particularly fashionable while performing an autopsy.

She will be wearing scrubs, pink, if the universe is feeling generous, PPE, sensible shoes, and maybe a cute scrub cap. Her hair will be pulled back, and there is a very real possibility she will be sweating underneath approximately nine layers of protective equipment.

But she will still be her.

And afterward?

Well.

The bow can go back in. 

Softness Does Not Make Me Less Serious

I think one of the strangest things about growing into a professional identity is realizing how many parts of your personality you have subconsciously labeled as things you will eventually need to “grow out of.”

For me, I do not think that has ever only been about clothes.

It has also been about the way I exist in a room.

I am bubbly. I get excited easily. I laugh a lot. I care deeply about people, sometimes probably more than is convenient, and I am not particularly good at pretending I do not. I like making people feel comfortable. I like checking in. I like celebrating other people's wins. And if I am fascinated by something, there is a very good chance you will know because apparently my face has never heard of professional secrecy.

None of those things are inherently unprofessional.

But somewhere along the way, I think I started wondering whether becoming a physician, especially a forensic pathologist, would eventually require me to become a little harder.

A little quieter.

A little less emotional.

A little more serious.

Because forensic pathology is serious.

The work involves death, trauma, disease, grief, and circumstances that can sometimes represent the absolute worst moments of someone's life. There will be cases that are devastating. There will be families searching for answers they never expected to need. There will be moments when professionalism requires composure regardless of what I am feeling internally.

And I take that responsibility incredibly seriously.

But I am starting to understand that taking the work seriously does not require taking myself seriously every second of the day.

Thank God, because that sounds exhausting.

I can be completely focused and professional when a situation calls for it and still be the person who laughs too loudly five minutes later in the break room. I can understand the weight of the work without carrying that weight into every part of my personality. I can be respectful without becoming emotionally distant.

And I can be soft without being incapable of handling hard things.

That last one has taken me a while to understand.

I think we sometimes treat softness like it is something fragile, as though being deeply affected by people or caring openly about them means you are not built for environments where difficult things happen.

But I do not think softness means difficult things do not affect you.

I think it means you refuse to let difficult things make you stop caring.

There is a difference.

When I worked in forensic medicine before medical school, I learned pretty quickly that you have to develop a certain ability to compartmentalize. You cannot emotionally absorb every detail of every case and expect to function indefinitely. There are boundaries you need to build, and I am sure I will continue learning where mine need to be throughout my career.

But I never want those boundaries to become indifference.

I never want to become so accustomed to seeing death that I forget what it represents to someone else.

Because while something may eventually become routine to me, it may be the worst day of another person's life.

That is something I hope I never lose sight of.

And strangely, I think my softer qualities may help me hold onto that.

The same part of me that notices when a friend is having a bad day is the part of me that remembers there are people attached to every case. The part of me that wants someone to feel heard is the same part that understands why giving a family an accurate answer matters. The part of me that feels things deeply is also the part that keeps reminding me that the work I find scientifically fascinating is connected to someone's very real loss.

Those qualities do not interfere with the science.

They give me a reason to care about doing the science well.

And I think that is especially important because forensic pathology requires objectivity. Compassion cannot mean deciding what you want the answer to be. You follow the evidence. You document what is there. You remain willing to change your interpretation when the findings do not support your original assumption.

Sometimes caring for someone means being relentlessly objective about what happened to them.

There is something beautiful about that to me.

Not beautiful in a romanticized way; death does not need to be made poetic to matter, but beautiful in the sense that even at the end of someone's life, there are people willing to approach their story with care, precision, and respect.

And maybe that is where I have been wrong about strength.

Maybe strength is not becoming unaffected.

Maybe professionalism is not becoming emotionless.

Maybe growing into this career does not mean I need to slowly replace every soft part of myself with some tougher, more polished version of me who never gets nervous, never gets emotional, and certainly never gets overly excited about seeing a really good histology slide.

Because let's be serious.

That woman is not coming.

If anything, medical school has already confirmed that. I can spend an afternoon discussing some truly devastating pathology and then five minutes later be delighted because I found a cute coffee cup.

My emotional range is apparently enormous.

And I am okay with that.

I want to become the kind of physician who can hold both.

Someone who can walk into difficult spaces without looking away from what is there, but who does not leave her humanity outside the door to make doing so easier.

Someone who can be objective without becoming cold.

Someone who can carry responsibility without making seriousness her entire personality.

Someone who understands that compassion and scientific rigor are not competing qualities.

And yes, someone who can still be bubbly and feminine and laugh and wear pink and be excited about life while choosing a career that spends a lot of time confronting its ending.

Maybe that is actually the point.

I do not want forensic pathology to harden me into someone capable of doing the work.

I want to become strong enough to do the work without letting it harden the parts of me I want to keep.

Because softness does not make me less serious about becoming a forensic pathologist.

It reminds me why I want to become one in the first place.

Why Forensic Fashionista?

When I first came up with the name Forensic Fashionista, I mostly loved it because it sounded like me.

It brought together two things that, at first glance, seem like they have absolutely no business being in the same sentence.

Forensics and femininity.

One represents the career I have been working toward for years: the science, medicine, investigation, pathology, and responsibility that I genuinely cannot wait to make my life's work.

The other represents the person who is going to do it.

The girl who loves pink. Who gets excited about a good outfit. Who probably owns more pink than any future forensic pathologist reasonably needs. Who is bubbly and emotional and occasionally a little dramatic. Who cares deeply about people and wants to hold onto that softness no matter how serious the work around her becomes.

For a while, I think I saw those as two different versions of myself.

Now, I think Forensic Fashionista exists because they were never different versions at all.

I do not have to choose between being feminine and being taken seriously. I do not have to become colder to work around difficult things. I do not have to mute the parts of myself that bring me joy just because the career I have chosen carries an enormous amount of responsibility.

And I certainly do not have to trade in the pink for beige.

We have established this.

The beige blazer will survive without me.

Forensic Fashionista is not about making forensic pathology fashionable. The work does not need an aesthetic, and the people at the center of it deserve far more respect than that.

It is about the woman standing beside it.

It is about building a career in a field I deeply respect without believing I need to become someone else before I am allowed to belong there.

Maybe one day, the name will represent a forensic pathologist who happens to love fashion.

Right now, though?

It represents a medical student who is still figuring things out. Still learning. Still growing. Still occasionally staring at a histology slide like it has personally betrayed her.

But she is getting there.

And she's doing it in pink.

A Little Pink Never Hurt Anyone

I started writing this post thinking I wanted to talk about fashion and the person I am becoming.

And technically, I guess I did.

But somewhere between pink scrubs, autopsy PPE, childhood episodes of CSI, and the imaginary beige blazer I have apparently been running from for half this post, I realized this conversation was never really about clothes.

It was about permission to remain yourself while becoming someone new.

Medicine is going to change me. I want it to. I hope I become more knowledgeable, more capable, more confident, and better equipped to care for the people who trust me. I hope forensic pathology challenges me, humbles me, and teaches me things I cannot even imagine yet.

But I do not think growth has to mean becoming less recognizable to myself.

I can become stronger without becoming harder.

I can become more professional without becoming less playful.

I can walk into incredibly serious spaces and understand exactly what they require of me without leaving every soft part of myself outside the door.

And I can wear the freaking pink.

Maybe someone will occasionally underestimate me because of it. Maybe there will always be people who make assumptions before I have the opportunity to show them who I am.

I cannot control that.

But I can control whether their assumptions become instructions for how I live my life.

And I am becoming increasingly uninterested in letting them.

So if you have ever felt like you needed to tone yourself down to fit the image of the person you are becoming, whether that is in medicine or somewhere completely different, I hope you give yourself permission to question who created that image in the first place.

You are allowed to grow without erasing yourself in the process.

Wear the thing that makes you happy. Keep the parts of your personality that make you you. Take your dreams incredibly seriously without taking yourself seriously every second of the day.

And please, for the love of everything, do not let an imaginary beige blazer win.

Thank you so much for joining me for another week here at Forensic Fashionista. I hope you enjoyed this week's post, learned a little more about why I love forensic pathology, and maybe left with permission to take up a little more space as exactly who you are.

I hope you have the most beautiful week ahead. Be kind to yourself, stay curious, and remember that becoming the person you are meant to be does not require leaving the person you already are behind.

As for me, I will be over here learning how to become a forensic pathologist one lecture, one histology slide, and one questionable medical-school decision at a time.

Preferably in pink.

I will see you next week. 💗

XOXO,

Kenzie

The Forensic Fashionista