Women have always found each other: reflections on a life in medicine for international WOMEN'S day
I have been thinking, lately, about all the times I knew something and said nothing.
I remember what those early years as a doctor felt like. The wards were loud with confident voices, and I was rarely one of them. I felt small, uncertain, anxious in ways I couldn’t quite articulate, like a spare part in a machine that everyone else seemed to know how to operate. The self-doubt was constant, a low hum beneath everything I did, and I carried it quietly because I assumed it meant something was wrong with me rather than with the world I had walked into.
And I know I am not alone in this. Speaking with other women doctors and healthcare professionals over the years, the same themes come up time and time again. The same feelings, the same struggles, the same sense of carrying something that was never quite acknowledged. Different women, different stages of their careers, different specialities and yet the same story, told in different words.
Something accumulated over years, absorbed so gradually I barely noticed it happening, had taught me to hesitate. To hold back. To wait and see whether someone else would say it first, and feel relieved when they did.
That is what it can feel like to be a woman in this work and in our world. The times you knew the answer, had the expertise, yet stayed quiet anyway. Of being right, and still going home to wonder if you were. Of leaving a room not quite able to name what happened, only that something did, and that it has happened before, and that you are very tired of it.
Nobody sits you down and tells you to doubt yourself. In a patriarchal culture it seeps in gradually, imperceptibly, through a thousand small moments of being talked over, second-guessed, or simply not heard - until the doubt feels like your own voice, and the silence feels like a choice you made.
And we do carry it, all of it, often silently. The emotional labour of holding teams together when things are fraying, the invisible work of softening difficult situations so they don’t combust and then absorbing what’s left over when they do. The grief that comes with caring deeply for patients inside systems that often don’t extend that same care to you. The constant, low-level calculation of how much of yourself is safe to show on any given day, in any given room, with any given person watching.
We carry all of it, and we tell ourselves, and everyone who asks, that we are ‘fine’. And over time, it takes a toll.
Some years ago, I began attending circle spaces. Small gatherings of women, sitting together with care and intention. The structure was simple: each person spoke if they chose to, and the others listened. Really listened, without interrupting, without advising, without redirecting toward solutions. You were not fixed. You were not managed. You were not given someone else’s version of what you had shared. You were simply witnessed, and that witnessing turned out to be more powerful than I had words for at the time.
Something shifted in those circles that I had not anticipated. The shame that I had been carrying around certain experiences began to loosen its grip. The self-doubt that had become such a constant companion grew quieter. And the feeling of being utterly alone in what I was experiencing - that, perhaps most of all, began to lift. I left those gatherings feeling more like myself. Clearer, somehow. Grounded in a way that the busyness of ordinary life rarely allowed.
That was when I understood, in my bones rather than just my mind, what women coming together can actually do for one another.
Women have always found each other, long before women supporting women was a hashtag. A knowing glance across the ward round, in words shared in the hospital canteen coffee queue, in the changing room at the end of a long shift. In those small, stolen moments of honest conversation where someone speaks the truth and someone else says, quietly, I know, me too, you are not imagining it. Sharing space, witnessing and finding in each other the strength to keep going.
Circle work, as I practice it with women doctors, is a return to something ancient - women have been gathering in circles, holding each other’s stories, finding strength together, long before any of us gave it a name or a framework. Each person is given equal time and equal space. What is spoken within the circle stays there. There is no advice-giving, no cross-talk, no well-meaning commentary on what someone else has shared, simply the rare and precious experience of speaking and being genuinely witnessed.
And what happens in those circles moves me, every time. Women who arrive feeling isolated leave with a sense that they are part of something. Women who had gone very quiet, find, sometimes with great surprise, that their voice is still there. Women who were certain they were the only one carrying what they were carrying discover, with an enormous relief that is almost physical, that they are not. Heard, and healed, and connected - not through anything dramatic, but through the simple, radical act of being truly seen.
International Women’s Day comes around every year, and every year we are thanked, celebrated, reposted. There is the ChatGPT generated LinkedIn post with cringe photo, the panel of impressive women, the all important hashtag. And every year, on the 9th of March, we walk back into the same spaces with the same dynamics unchanged, still navigating a world in which the loudest voices in the room, in the meeting, in parliament, in public life, on the global stage - are so rarely ours.
This year, for me, it is a day to sit with some questions about the work I love, and the world we share. About why so many women in medicine are working until they drop, carrying an emotional load that is rarely acknowledged or shared equally. About the lack of flexibility and autonomy that makes a demanding job feel impossible. About the shame that still shadows women who speak up, slow down, or dare to need something differently.
Real support, the kind that actually changes something, does not happen in a gesture or for one day a year. But it can happen in the sustained, quiet act of women making genuine space for one another. Of witnessing each other. Of refusing, with loving tenderness and fire in our bellies, to let each other disappear.
Women have always known this. We have always found each other.
It is time to do it with intention.
Because we need each other now more than ever.
If you recognise yourself in any of this, I would love to hear from you.
You can find out more about Florescence; A Sister Circle for Women in Medicine here