The Divide

I am watching Grey's Anatomy, and I am stressed out. They're taking their boards, and all of them are complete disasters. Meredith has the flu (like mid-exam she's throwing up into the garbage can), Karev shows up thirty minutes late and misses the entire first section, Christina is being Christina (condescending, arrogant, antagonistic), red-haired girl is sweating like an overweight football player and frantically giving her answers with raised intonation at the end of each sentence, and Avery boy is super distracted by his steel-blue eyes and his mom/red-haired girl. I can barely breath.

They only have one chance for this test, and if they don't pass they have to wait an entire year to take it again. I don't really know the real-world significance of the exam since TV tries to make everything seem like the worst thing ever (Wikipedia leads me to believe that it's a voluntary certification that doctors choose to undertake), but regardless of the ramifications, failure is failure. Halfway through the episode, we find out that one of them didn't pass (omg), but we don't know who. Each of them has good reason to fail (see disaster paragraph above). At the very end of the episode, four of them are standing together trying to refresh their phones to find out their results. They're all convinced that they didn't make the cut. But one by one, they get their pass notification and they squeal and laugh and hug.

Then the failure walks up to the group in disbelief. And the episode ends with the four who passed clustered together staring in shock at the one who didn't.

And even though just moments before it could have been any one of them who didn't pass the boards, there is instantly this insurmountable divide between the passers and the non passer. And now comes my deepest thought of the day (thanks, Grey's!): I wonder if my life would be different if I weren't so terrified of being on the non-passer side of this divide?