Transformation

 If you want to live well, I think you must ask yourself if you are prepared to lose everything and reinvent yourself a hundred times. I am now old enough to look back on periods of my life with both gratitude and a deep sense of the bittersweet. 

I think of my first job in ultrasound, of my mentor, and of the team she constructed through diligence, hard work, and persistence. I am skeptical I will ever look up to another human being in the same way again. I think of the vibrancy of working there, the sense of team and mutual mission that drove us all forward. And at its core was a mutual devotion to the integrity of medicine and to care that held the humanity of our patients at the center of every choice we made. It was the best place I have ever practiced ultrasound and, of course, I had no idea of its rarity until I left.

Today I worked the floor again, covering a vacancy at a facility I helped to open as a sonographer several years ago. Our team there was devoted to patients, though it wasn't academic medicine, and we worked together. There were many, many competent hospitalists who had been recruited from other locations and for the first couple of years, I felt the same sense of home and belonging I did in my first job. It was less intellectual, less academic, and my practice was something of an outlier compared with others who worked there, but I worked with like-minded, kind human beings.

Working there again today left me feeling raw. I miss my friends. I miss caring for patients. I miss working with an exacting pride that is the result of arduous training, attention-to-detail, and never providing patients a service that is half of what you're able. I miss the pride of identifying a rare diagnosis or of attempting to piece together components of a pathological process for a patient.

Medicine, when it is not for profit, is infinitely filling. Medicine, when practiced at its high level and in collaboration with others devoted to the same cause, is transformative. I suspect my sense of bittersweetness is not only about a mourning and a wishing for days which are now gone but for a time when healthcare still held patients instead of profit as its core value. So many systems have made employees replaceable and made patients a commodity. So many systems have prioritized efficiency and productivity over the art of sharing humanity with the most vulnerable amongst us.

And yet, I cannot go back. I cannot time travel. And the place we have all landed now, different though it may be, can still hold moments of overwhelming beauty. Covering a cold patient with a blanket, offering a hand through a difficult procedure, and truly connecting with another in a dark room with the low hum of my machine is still infinitely transformative. 

It will all be different. The best moments of our lives will never be repeated. And we often walk through them without realizing we are in the midst of the extraordinary. And despite this, there is also beauty ahead. There will be untold moments of connection and ecstasy and bliss. The profound, though in constant evolution, is nearly always one courageous decision away.

Googly Eyes

I recently stepped back from one day at my job, which was reason for celebration. I have been juggling too much, holding on by the very tips of my fingers, and the last few weeks made it abundantly clear that my plate was overly full. It was too much. I was drowning. It was undoubtedly the right thing to do, but it meant goodbyes to two women who have, in very short order, had outsized influence on my well-being, my mind, and my heart.

There are so many ways their mere existence reminds me of who I once was; we spent one afternoon sticking googly eyes to baby pictures around our office. I had forgotten I was capable of laughing like that because, at some point along the way, I just stopped. When I arrived at work after both of them, they would dance preposterously at me through the window; they would gyrate, waving and wiggling, until I looked into the office window and laughed at their audacity, the contagiousness of their joy a visceral reminder not to run from ecstasy.

There was ample silliness, but also deep sincerity and a bearing of souls in the most earnest and vulnerable way. They held me precisely how I am while also challenging me to see more, dream more, and be more. They shared truth and speculation and hope in a space that felt sacred. We shared our history in a way that is so rare for adults; I told them things I don't tell most people about the ways my heart has broken and exposed to them, in the sheer light of the day, the inevitable fractures and scars I mostly try to hide.

We created one of the richest and safest spaces I have ever been a part of and it is with deep mourning that I say goodbye to our every Tuesday gathering. It has happened only a few times in my thirty eight years that I meet people whose mere existence is an embrace. It is such a rare and beautiful thing to be wandering in the world and to bump into a piece of your soul walking in another person's body.

It is a bit of infinite beauty that any of us is entitled to these chance encounters with human beings who challenge one to be more open, more kind, more daring, and more authentic. It has been a year of daring, of encouraging one another to live with startling ferocity and fearlessness. And what astoundingly good fortune that we should meet at all, let alone that together we should bear witness to one another's metamorphosis.

Mothering

I worry about you because this part is so hard. These early years are all-consuming, exhausting, and isolating. It's so easy to lose touch with who you fundamentally are and to despair because the days never seem to end and each subsequent one feels precisely like those which have come before. And adages like, "Once they turn five, it is SO worth it" don't mean much when you're in the thick of things and you can barely make it to tomorrow. I need you to know that you aren't alone and that I haven't forgotten the loneliness of midnight followed by two am followed by four am followed by dragging yourself out of bed to do work you could care less about because our rotten country doesn't give a fuck what happens to women or children or families.

Having small children was, hands down, one of the most challenging and difficult periods of my life and though I am starting to come out and see the other side, you are deeply immersed and you did it during a global pandemic without a community of parents to help carry the load because we all lived with such fear of one another for most of the time you have been a mother.

In the thick of it, I worried that the person I was had disappeared. I thought I might never truly laugh again. I was, without knowing it, the most suicidal and unhinged I have ever been. I was desperate for a break, for a night of uninterrupted sleep, without any sense that could occur in any kind of immediate future. When you are in the middle of it, it feels endless and the exhaustion seeps through your bones to your very marrow and it all feels like some kind of terrible nightmare.

At least, up until very recently, that was my experience as a young, working mother. And it is such a mixed and ugly way to feel because that sense of fatalism is so very, very real but it is coupled with a deep, endearing, and limitless love for the creature beside you. They are love and joy and light and you can't help but smile when they do and you can't help but cheer them onward as they take those first stumbling steps away.

I can't make these years or this time easier for you, but I want you to know that you're not doing it alone. I wish I could do it physically beside you, but perhaps just knowing I think about you constantly is some kind of balm? Perhaps knowing that you aren't isolated in your struggle and desperation can be some kind of solace?

And in the years we have ahead of us, we need to work so that our daughters and sons don't feel so very, very alone as they set off on this journey. It is an absolute bit of lunacy that women endure pregnancy while working full time, endure the trauma of labor, and then are asked to return to work at six weeks to proceed like their child was a temporary nuisance who can be erased with full-time daycare when the mere presence of that child has demolished any sense of the human being they were before parenthood. The fact that women and men are expected to shed their pre-parental skin and develop an entirely new one while pretending it is all fine is one of the norms our ancestors will judge inhumane and unjust and ugly.

You are one of the loveliest humans I have had the privilege of meeting and loving. Your sons are so lucky to have your humanity, wisdom, and guidance as they make their way into a world that often feels too big, too unpredictable, and too scary. You are a light in this sometimes dark world and, even though it wasn't always modeled in your childhood, you are going to raise beautiful, brave, courageous, and supported children. I know it feels scary, but you are going to give them the love you didn't always feel and you are going to avoid so many of the traps your parents did not. I know this about you not as some wild conjecture, but because you have loved me and held me and kept me afloat even when despair blinded me.

I know it can feel dark in the thick of things. But I am here. So long as I can, I will always be here. And while I have breath left in this body, I will whisper my love for you into the night, into a passing cloud, where I pray it might land gently in your heart at midnight and two am and four am and you will remember, always, that you are beloved and lovable and that being their mom and my dearest is the universe thrumming with a reminder that there is, amongst the chaos, infinite blessings, a degree of order, and some things which are irrevocable and immutable and forever.

Art Is Your Birthright

Art is your birthright. Have you forgotten? 

I have forgotten no less than one thousand times, consumed with the busy tasks of a day and neglectful of the very existence of my soul. From our very origins, we have been creators. We have painted on the walls of caves, constructed our own clothing, and told stories around a fire. We found ways to make paint from the things which grew around us, to augment our own appearance as an expression of personal taste. Before we did many of the things we consider "human," we were artists.

Do you let yourself play piano anymore? Do you still write? Do you believe you are more than the sum of your professional parts, the total of your bi-monthly income?

Even now, art serves you. I suspect you don't suffer to find the proper word when constructing an email and I anticipate you are well-spoken when called on in meetings. Maybe sometimes you find yourself thinking of a funny prank or joke and find the small glint of a smile spread across your lips?

Art is our birthright. We are born to tap deeply into a well of expression and to make something fresh and new and intimate to us, even if it isn't anything very noble or beautiful. Creating something is the thing that matters. Giving birth to something that started as barely the whisper of an idea, of a drawing, of a story.

When we fall in love with one another, we are not falling in love with the accolades, achievements, awards, or credentials; when we look at a human and we burn desperately for them, we are falling in love with their fire, with their story, with their artistry. Unconditional love is not a business negotiation, but a work of the soul and the song we were born with (which we lived loudly as children, but seem to inevitably quiet with the passing of years).

Art is your birthright. Love is your birthright. Create something today that did not exist yesterday; it is your destiny to live a life more examined, more expressed, and more intricately projected than you believe. When you tap into art, you are tapping into your own humanity, your very existence, and you are reminded that while you are here temporarily, your home is actually amongst the stars.