Grow your Creativity
Creativity is closely connected to vulnerability, which is ultimately where we find our humanity. I started this blog as an outlet during the fall after I finished my chief residency in family medicine, and was taking time off from medicine to care for my mom. If I’m honest, I was also really burnt out on medical work, and wasn’t sure I wanted to continue practicing. I started this blog because a friend of mine told me, when it came to creativity, I had to “just do.” It was liberating. As a chief resident, I always wanted to do everything 100%, but one of my advisors pushed me to let things go at 95%. Because that last 5% mattered only to me, and not to anyone else. It was liberating.
When I launched the blog, I learned the therapeutic power of writing. I learned that when I wrote about things that were sad and hard, two amazing things happened. First, when I revised or reflected on the pain, I found new moments of levity and beauty and humor. I found new meaning in moments that were steeped in monotony and agony. Second, when I shared my experiences with others, they resonated. We all are living lives that share qualities of beauty and agony. Especially now. Especially with COVID.
After my mom died, I felt untethered. I’ve used this word a lot over the past five years. It can be an uncomfortable feeling. But I used that time to explore things I’ve always longed to explore. My mom died, and instead of feeling a sense of purpose and beauty and something people might call God, I felt… alone. And angry. It was breathtaking to me how one moment, my mom was there - minimally conscious and interactive, but still there, still responding and smiling to the world around her. And the next moment, she was just gone. No note. No ghostly apparition leaving her body. I felt her pulse stop at 6:11 am, and then she was gone.
I realized pretty quickly after that how fragile life is. How unimportant so much of life is. And I used that to dive into things I’d been afraid to explore. I started to perform again. I fell in love with acting. I completed a five-semester Meisner program in Ithaca and performed in ten plays (including a two-woman self-produced show) and multiple student films locally. I fell in love with acting so hard that I moved my husband and me to Los Angeles so I could explore it. I immersed myself in it as much as I could, and had over 40 auditions and studied with some of the best acting teachers and programs in the world, including Margie Haber, Leslie Kahn, Killian MgHugh, UCB, and Groundlings. I booked a couple commercials and even a small TV role, and enjoyed the world of background acting with the likes of Issa Rae and Fran Drescher. I also got pregnant and had our first child. And I also struggled. I missed using my medical brain.
So this past year, I was excited to be accepted in to Harvard University’s Media and Medicine program, and through this program, there has been a recurring theme raised by many of the 60+ participants - a blend of doctors, educators, students, and activists. We all missed using the creative part of our brain, and this program is reopening it for us to play around in.