C is for Creativity

In August 1985, I was 31 years old, about to enter medical school. I was bored, bored to the point of feeling stressed by my boredom. I took a job to earn some money until school began. It was a sales job, and I hated it.

During the launch of a new product, a medical transport chair with a built-in lift, my boss asked me to work an evening shift. I was an “operator standing by” to field phone calls during the launch video being aired on the west coast. No one called during my shift, but I came prepared for the tedium.

A Resource

I brought my new copy of Gabriele Lusser Rico’s Writing the Natural Way. I did the writing exercises, including the use of word clusters. A switch got flipped in my brain, and I wrote my first poem that night. I modeled it after a poem by another writer, a poem for one of my sisters. It wasn’t a good poem, but it was meaningful for both my sister and me.

The Outcome

I wouldn’t write another poem for ten years. A crisis of grief over one of my patients was the trigger. I dropped the poetry thread during the rigors of medical school and postgraduate training. But when I picked it up again in 1995, that thread became a lifeline pulling me forward, one poem at a time. Writing that first poem in 1985 turned out to be a micro transformation. Medical training suppressed that spark for a time but ultimately it had its full effect.

The poetry switch needed to be turned on in my brain so that poetry could be there as solace when I encountered grief and burnout later in my professional life. Poetry also brought me into a community outside of medicine. I needed that nurturing, nontoxic community to support me in a way that medical culture couldn’t.