Women In Medicine: Why We Soften What We Want

I know what I want.

This should not be a particularly controversial sentence.

I want to become a forensic pathologist. I want to build a career I am proud of. I have places I would love to train, things I want to accomplish, and a very specific picture of the kind of physician I am working toward becoming.

Ask me what I want, and I can tell you. And yet, sometimes when I actually say those things out loud, I hear myself reaching for a softer word.

Hopefully.

Hopefully, I will become a forensic pathologist. Hopefully, I will train somewhere like that. Maybe I will get to do this someday. I would love to, if everything works out. If I am lucky. We will see.

It is such a small thing that I did not really notice I was doing it at first. None of those phrases sound particularly strange. In fact, they sound polite. Reasonable. Appropriately humble. They leave room for the reality that life is unpredictable and that wanting something does not guarantee you will get it.

All of which is true.

But I started wondering why saying what I actually meant felt so much more uncomfortable.

Because there is a difference between acknowledging that the future is uncertain and pretending that I am uncertain about what I want.

I do not know exactly where I will train. I do not know what opportunities I will have. I do not know whether every version of the future I can picture for myself will actually happen.

But I know I want it. And somehow, that can feel like the most vulnerable thing to say.

There is something strangely exposing about ambition when you stop cushioning it. No “hopefully” to make it smaller. No “maybe” to give yourself an exit. No “if I’m lucky” to reassure everyone that you understand you are not entitled to the outcome.

Just: I want this.

Maybe that is why those tiny words are so easy to reach for.

And maybe it is worth paying attention to what we are asking them to hide.

The Little Linguistic Insurance Policy

There is another reason I think these words are so appealing.

They give us somewhere to hide.

If I say, “Hopefully, I will get there,” I have already built uncertainty into the sentence. If it does not happen, well, I knew it might not. I never claimed otherwise.

But saying, “I want this”? Now you know.

You know that I care. You know that I am trying. You know that there is an outcome I am quietly, or not so quietly, hoping my life moves toward. And if I do not get it, you will know that too.

That is a surprisingly vulnerable position to put yourself in.

I think we talk about ambition as though it is purely an expression of confidence. You know what you want. You announce it. You work toward it. Very inspirational. Cue the montage. But there is another side of ambition that we do not talk about nearly as much.

Wanting something openly means accepting the possibility of being seen wanting it unsuccessfully.

There is no guarantee that every goal I say out loud will become part of my life. I could work incredibly hard for something and still not get it. I could change my mind. Life could change the plan for me. I could discover that the thing I had been chasing was not actually where I belonged.

And if I have spent years saying “maybe,” there is a strange kind of protection in that.

Maybe I wanted it. Maybe I did not. Maybe it just did not work out. No one can quite tell how much it mattered to me.

There is safety in being difficult to disappoint. But there is also a cost.

Because if I constantly soften the things I want just in case I fail to reach them, I am asking the possibility of future disappointment to dictate how honestly I am allowed to speak about myself today. And I do not think I want to do that.

I can want something deeply without believing I am entitled to it. I can be confident about the direction I am moving while knowing the road could change. I can say, “I want to become a forensic pathologist,” without pretending that I already know exactly how the next several years of my life will unfold.

Wanting is not predicting. Ambition is not a guarantee. And saying what I want out loud does not make failure more embarrassing. It just makes the wanting visible.

The Weird Rules Around Women Who Want Things

Of course, none of this happens in a vacuum. Women receive a lot of conflicting messages about ambition.

Be confident, but not arrogant. Speak up, but do not dominate the room. Know your worth, but stay humble. Have big goals, but make sure everyone knows you would be perfectly fine if they did not happen.

It is a strange little balancing act.

And I do not think most of us are consciously running through that checklist every time we talk about our future. I certainly am not standing there thinking, "Better add a “hopefully” so everyone still finds me pleasant."

That would be ridiculous. But we learn what gets rewarded.

We notice which women are described as confident and which are described as full of themselves. We notice when directness becomes “intimidating,” when certainty becomes “aggressive,” or when a woman talking openly about what she wants suddenly seems to require an explanation for why she deserves to want it.

There is research behind some of this. Studies on self-promotion and gender have found that women can navigate different social expectations around openly presenting their accomplishments and competence. Other research has explored the backlash women may experience when they behave in ways that clash with traditional expectations of warmth or agreeableness.

Which is a very academic way of saying: sometimes there is a social cost to taking up space without making yourself smaller first.

And I think we get remarkably good at making ourselves smaller in ways that do not look like shrinking.

We do not necessarily abandon the goal. We just soften the sentence.

“I am going to apply, but it is super competitive.” “I would love to do that someday.” “I mean, we will see what happens.” “Hopefully.”

The ambition is still there. We have simply wrapped it in enough uncertainty that no one could possibly mistake us for thinking too highly of ourselves.

And to be clear, humility matters. I do not want to walk through medicine, or life, believing that wanting something automatically means I deserve to have it. There will always be people who know more than I do, opportunities I have to earn, and outcomes I cannot control. But humility and self-erasure are not the same thing.

I can respect how much I still have to learn without pretending I do not know where I want to go. I can admire the people ahead of me without treating my own ambition like it needs permission to exist. And I can leave room for life to surprise me without introducing every dream as though I only happened to stumble across it.

Some things are not accidents. Some things we chose. Some things we worked for. Some things we wanted.

Women In Medicine: Humility Does Not Require Pretending You Have No Idea Where You Are Going

Medicine makes this especially complicated. Because humility is not optional here.

There is always more to learn. There will always be someone in the room who knows more than I do. There are going to be questions I cannot answer, diagnoses I miss, concepts I have to relearn for what feels like the seventeenth time, and moments when the most responsible thing I can say is, “I do not know.”

Medical school has a particularly efficient way of reminding you that confidence and competence are not the same thing.

One difficult exam can humble you before lunch.

So yes, I want to be humble. I want to remain teachable. I want to be the kind of physician who can admit when she is wrong, ask for help when she needs it, and never becomes so confident in what she knows that she stops questioning what she might be missing.

But somewhere along the way, I think it is easy to confuse being humble about what we know with being hesitant about who we want to become. Those are not the same thing.

I can say, “I have so much left to learn,” and also say, “I want to be a forensic pathologist.” I can be a medical student who is still figuring things out and a woman with very specific ambitions at the same time. I do not have to earn the right to want something by already being qualified to have it.

That one has taken me a while to understand. Because there is always another milestone waiting to make the dream feel more legitimate.

Maybe I will feel comfortable saying it after I finish medical school. After residency. After fellowship. After I have the title. After someone else looks at everything I have done and confirms that, yes, I am officially allowed to talk like I belong here.

But if I keep waiting until I am completely qualified to speak confidently about where I am going, I will spend my entire training describing my own future like I am merely suggesting it. And I do not want to do that.

I am still learning. I am still becoming. I am still very capable of opening a question bank and being personally attacked by a concept I was convinced I understood yesterday.

None of that makes my ambition less real.

There is a difference between saying, “I already know everything I need to know,” and saying, “This is what I am working toward.”

One is arrogance. The other is direction.

Maybe humility is not making ourselves smaller. Maybe it is being honest about where we are while still being honest about where we want to go.

What Happens When You Just Say It?

Try saying something you really want without adding anything to the end of it.

Not: “I want this, but I know it is really competitive.”

Not: “I want this, although obviously anything could happen.”

Not even: “I want this, but we will see.”

Just: "I want this."

It feels weird, does it not? Even writing it makes me feel like I should immediately follow it with some sort of disclaimer.

I want to become a forensic pathologist.

There.

My brain would now like to submit several supporting documents proving that I understand residency is competitive, life is unpredictable, plans can change, and the universe has not personally guaranteed me anything.

Thank you, brain. Your concerns have been noted.

But none of those things change the sentence.

I want this.

I think there is a temptation to believe that saying something that plainly is a declaration of certainty. As though speaking confidently about what we want means we are claiming the outcome before we have earned it.

But wanting something is not the same as assuming you will get it.

It is not manifestation. It is not entitlement. It is not a guarantee.

It is information.

This matters to me. This is something I am willing to work toward. This is a direction I am choosing for my life right now. And “right now” matters.

Because saying what I want today does not mean I have signed a legally binding contract with every version of myself who comes after me.

I am allowed to change. I am allowed to discover something new. I am allowed to chase something wholeheartedly and eventually realize that I want something else.

Changing my mind later would not make me foolish for wanting it now. That matters to me because sometimes I think we soften our ambitions not only because we are afraid of failing, but because we are afraid of being wrong.

What if I tell everyone this is what I want and then, three years from now, it is not?

Then three years from now, I will say something different. That does not require me to be vague today.

There is something freeing about separating desire from destiny.

I do not have to know exactly how my story ends to speak honestly about the chapter I am in. And maybe that is what I am trying to practice.

Not louder ambition. Not performative confidence. Not pretending I have everything figured out. Just a little less editing before I let myself say what I mean.

I want this.

And for now, that is enough.

Maybe You Mean “Hopefully.” And Maybe You Do Not.

I am not declaring war on the word “hopefully.”

Sometimes hopefully is exactly the right word. Sometimes I genuinely do not know what I want yet. Sometimes I would love for something to happen, but I am not ready to build my life around it. Sometimes “maybe” is honest. Sometimes “we will see” is the only answer there is.

Uncertainty is not weakness, and I do not think confidence requires turning every passing thought into a five-year plan. But I do want to start noticing when the uncertainty in my sentence does not actually belong there.

When I say “hopefully” even though I know exactly what I am hoping for. When I say “maybe” because saying “yes, this matters to me” feels a little too exposed. When I immediately explain how difficult something will be because I am worried that simply wanting it will make me sound like I think I deserve it. When I shrink the sentence before anyone else has even had the chance to react to it.

Those are the moments I want to catch.

Not because every woman needs to become louder. Not because ambition has to be announced to be real. And certainly not because there is anything wrong with being thoughtful, humble, uncertain, or private about the things that matter to us.

I just do not want humility to become a disguise for being afraid to admit that I care.

There are things I want. There are things I am working toward. There are futures I can picture so clearly that saying “maybe” feels less like uncertainty and more like an apology for having pictured them at all.

So maybe the goal is not to remove “hopefully” from our vocabulary. Maybe it is simply to stop using it when what we really mean is something else.

I want this.

I do not know exactly how it will happen. I do not know when it will happen. I do not know whether the path there will look anything like the one I currently imagine. But I am allowed to want it before I know the ending.

And if someday I want something different, I will be allowed to say that too.

For now, though? I think “I want this” is a complete sentence.

Thanks for spending a little time with me for the first Women in White Coats piece here on Forensic Fashionista.

This is a new little corner of the blog where I want to talk more about women, medicine, ambition, identity, and all the complicated things that can come with building a life and career we genuinely want.

I have a feeling I am going to catch myself saying “hopefully” a lot more often after writing this, and honestly, that might be the point. Not to eliminate the word, but to notice when I am using it because I am genuinely uncertain and when I am using it because admitting how badly I want something feels a little too vulnerable.

So now I want to hear from you.

Is there something you know you want but still find yourself softening when you talk about it? A career, a degree, a promotion, a life you are building, or something completely different?

Whatever it is, maybe you do not need to know exactly how the story ends before you are allowed to say that you want it.

Until next time.

XOXO,

Kenzie

The Forensic Fashionista