Hi, I'm really sorry that you're feeling this way - people can be cruel and medical school is hard. I want to get up on my soapbox for just a bit because I have a lot of experience feeling like I'm not a natural born genius.
I feel like a lot of people in medical school face no resistance academically until they get to medical school itself, at which point they meet their match. And for a long time, I felt really inferior and frankly bad about myself because this just simply wasn't the case for me. As early as when I was in elementary school, I didn't "get" things the same way my friends often did. I got placed in the lowest math class in sixth grade while my friends got placed in the highest because of how I scored on some test, and had to fight the whole year to get transferred to the middle math class. I would stay up for hours working on my writing assignments that took other students a normal amount of time.
Then I got to high school - they said, "this isn't going to be like middle school, where you can just glance over everything the night before and get all As!" And I thought I was completely screwed, because that hadn't been my experience at all - I was right. I got terrible grades for two years before I finally figured out the right strategy. I never became a superstar, but started doing well enough.
Then came college. At my orientation, they said, "this isn't going to be like high school, where you can study the night before and get a perfect GPA." And I thought, "here we go again." Because apparently this was a common sentiment among my new peers - but certainly not me. I thought high school was really hard! I still vividly remember the first day of my intro cell biology course. I was basically holding my breath the entire hour hoping that he was going to the spend the whole time talking about the syllabus and expectations, and not actual science. I wasn't ready yet! Thankfully, I was spared until the next session. I was able to do pretty well in college, but at great cost. I worked like a dog and sacrificed a lot.
Then I got into medical school. Again, "I know a lot of you were able to just study the night before in college and get a 4.0, it won't be like that here!" "****." The first two years of medical school were certainly the greatest academic challenge I have ever been confronted with. And I struggled - a lot. I came very close to failing multiple tests, and felt like I was putting in 10x the effort of everyone else, who were able to actually live their lives and do fun things and still did much better than me. All I know about my class rank during preclinical years is that it was in the bottom 50%. I felt like I was constantly underwater for at the least the first six months or so, but like everything else I ultimately figured out how I was supposed to study and do well, and once I did that I found my stride. I ended up graduating in the top 20% of the class, was an AOA candidate (though didn't get it), got an award for academic achievement, and couples matched at a great program in a competitive specialty. I caught my stride towards the very end of M2 year and for the rest of medical school.
Other medical students can be very judgmental and non-understanding of anybody who ever had any kind of academic difficulty. This forum can unfortunately be a good example of that, I see comments on here that say things like "I just did Anki for a month and got a 250 on Step 1, no problem." In this very thread somebody says "just get a 240 on Step 1" as if that's a simple feat. You have to block that stuff out. I think that all anyone can do is try to maximize their own potential and do as well as they can with the cards they are dealt. You are doing great, keep up the good work.
