Odd Girl Out, Doctor Within
The best-selling memoir Odd Girl Out, Doctor Within is Dr. Remina Panjwani’s story of becoming the person she was told she couldn’t be.
The best-selling memoir Odd Girl Out, Doctor Within is Dr. Remina Panjwani’s story of becoming the person she was told she couldn’t be. The daughter of South Asian immigrants, she grew up hearing she wasn’t pretty enough, thin enough or smart enough, and was expected to stay small, stay quiet and serve. At eighteen she enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. In Iraq, a rocket exploded within yards of where she was stationed, and one thought cut through everything: “I can’t die yet.” She came home, went to college and then medical school, and became a physician.
It is part memoir, part field guide. Woven through her story are the practices that carried her: breathwork for the nervous system, nourishment, self-care, recognition of her own triggers, and the habit of asking “why not me?” instead of “why me?” A companion Empowerment Tools section gives readers an exercise for every chapter. For anyone who has been told they are too small, too different or not enough.
“I learned that my worth was not inherited through suffering but forged in the fire of my own becoming.”
“I wouldn’t be broken; I couldn’t be broken because I had already been broken down to pieces and rebuilt stronger from what I endured early on.”
“I began to change the cycles of being a victim by asking a different question of ‘why not me?’ instead of the habitual, ‘why me?’”
The War Zone
Odd Girl Out, Doctor Within · pp. 15–21
She had been told she wasn't good enough. So she joined the Air Force. In "The War Zone," Dr. Remina Panjwani, the first in her family to serve and a South Asian woman entering a predominantly male world, arrives at boot camp already battle-tested by a childhood that tried to break her. Then comes the deployment her recruiter swore would never happen, and a rocket that lands within yards of her. "I can't die here. I can't die yet." What she decides next sets her on the road to becoming a physician. This is the chapter where the book turns from surviving to purpose. Download it and read the moment everything changed.
Dr. Remina Panjwani, DO, is an internal medicine physician, a U.S. Air Force veteran and the founder of a renowned concierge functional medicine practice in Dallas–Fort Worth.
Read her full story →