There is an old parable about a farmer whose horse runs away.

The neighbors cry, “Such bad luck!”

The farmer only replies, “Maybe so, maybe not. We will see.”

The next day, the horse returns with two wild horses. “Such good fortune!” they cheer.

Again, the farmer answers, “Maybe so, maybe not. We will see.”

Soon after, the farmer’s son breaks his leg taming one of the horses. “Such misfortune!”

The farmer answers, “Maybe so, maybe not. We will see.”

Weeks later, the army arrives to conscript all able young men. The son is spared.

The lesson is simple: in real time, we cannot know whether any event is inherently good or bad. Only in hindsight do we begin to find meaning. That parable became my grounding tool.

On paper, I was doing well in medical school. Before I ever sat for Step 1, I survived a motor vehicle accident that shattered my dominant hand. While studying and spending hours in hand therapy, I tied my shoes with my teeth. I fainted trying to pick up a Styrofoam cube. I lived with permanent loss of sensation and flexibility. Still, I took Step 1 (in pain, on medication, unable to use my right hand) and I passed.

I returned to clerkships determined to prove myself, and I did. I earned honors on my first, a high pass on my second, and strong evaluations throughout. Attendings called me proactive, attentive, and a valued member of the team. My accommodations: extended time, private testing rooms, telemedicine flexibility, were approved on paper under ADA law, but never implemented.

Instead, I was reminded of a bylaw: students without “full motor capacity” may not belong in the program. And when I struggled, professionalism entered the picture. Not as guidance. Not as remediation. But as a hammer. When I tried to return, vague professionalism citations replaced due process. I was dismissed, not for failing Step 1 or clerkships, but for “professionalism,” even though every evaluation affirmed I had met professionalism criteria across domains.

That dismissal was not just academic. Like my hand, it fractured my sense of self. Around the same time, my partner of six years ended our relationship. He had envisioned a dual-income, stable household. With my uncertainty, debt, grief, and dismissal, I had become more of a liability than an asset. It was too much for him, and it was too much for me, too.

I do not blame him, but it deepened the grief. Grieving someone who is still alive is its own form of torture. In some ways, it is harder than grieving those I have loved who have died. At least death offers finality. Ambiguous loss does not. It lingers. It reshapes you in silence.

I was not just losing my hand. I was not just losing my career. I was losing the version of myself I thought I was building, and the future I thought I would share.

Psychiatry gave me language for this.

Grief is not a five-stage process. It is cyclical, intrusive, nonlinear. It strips away certainty and identity. It leaves you asking: Am I broken? Am I resilient? Am I growing? Or am I simply in denial?

Yet psychiatry also taught me about post-traumatic growth, the paradox that loss, while devastating, can also generate meaning.

In hand therapy, I found community. We joked about Velcro shoes, cursed our splints, and cried about futures we were not sure we still had. That room, raw, unpolished, human, felt more real than any “resilience curriculum.” I learned that resilience is not about avoiding loss. It is about weaving it into who you are becoming.

Psychiatry lives in that grey space. It asks us to hold paradox: fragility and strength, despair and hope, identity lost and identity remade.

Looking back, my accident felt like the worst thing that ever happened to me. My dismissal did too. And my breakup, that was the worst of all. Maybe they all were. Or maybe not. Maybe, like the farmer says, “Maybe so, maybe not. We will see.”

Because none of them broke me completely. Or maybe they all did, and maybe that is the point. They forced me to grieve an old identity and begin forming a truer one. They taught me to live in uncertainty, where meaning is created slowly. And they reminded me that grief, though cruel, may also be psychiatry’s greatest teacher.

Professionalism should nurture growth. But when left vague, it becomes a projection, a Rorschach test of institutional bias. For me, it became a weapon. And we cannot afford to keep losing bright, dedicated students this way. Not because they could not become good physicians, but because the system chose not to support them.

So, I keep the parable close. Maybe my accident was the worst thing. Maybe my dismissal was. Maybe my heartbreak was.

Maybe so.
Maybe not.
We will see.

Because in the end, grief is not just about medicine, or professionalism, or even loss. It is about what it means to be human: fragile and resilient, broken and remade, uncertain and still moving forward. And maybe that is the lesson psychiatry has to offer all of us, that our worth is not in being flawless, even as “doctors,” but in being fully human. That, perhaps, is the truest professionalism of all.

Hannah Wulk is a medical student.