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Specific Gravity
Once my heart was ballast in my chest,
so sinkingly heavy I couldn’t stand.
I slept for as many hours as there
were memories. I couldn’t bear
to look at myself, at my bloated face,
my dull eyes. As time went on, I learned
to throw everything, even my marrow,
overboard. Now, as I go, I seek (more…)
A newsletter I follow, 33 Charts, a blog on Medicine and Technology by Bryan Vartabedian, MD, came back online with an apology for “going dark” after nothing was posted for several weeks. Metaphors matter. I prefer Jocelyn Glei’s language for gaps in creativity, lying fallow.
When I say I’ve been lying fallow, I like the implication that what seems to be inactivity on the surface still has a lot going on underneath. The truth is, though I’ve not been posting, there’s been no gap in my creativity. Quite the contrary.
For the past three weeks, I’ve been writing and sharing my writing.
(more…)This year, 2020, feels different to me. Last year, I was organized and disciplined about the way I approached my annual goals. I planned in December 2018, and I hit the ground running. I had two goals for each quarter of the year, and I made significant progress on almost all of them.
This year, I’m not making any specific outcome goals. I’m focused on systems and processes. My aim is to develop better habits and to trust the outcomes to take care of themselves. But it’s not just the type of goals that have changed. It’s my attitude of easing into these goals with self-kindness, self-awareness, and self-forgiveness.
I have a colleague at work who does astrological charts as a hobby. He told me that Jupiter, the planet of expansiveness and potential, will be in Capricorn, my sun sign, for the whole year. That resonates with my theme for 2020 of developing my potential.
I’m reading James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. So far, I haven’t learned anything I didn’t already know from reading Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit or from Wendy Wood’s Good Habits, Bad Habits. Or from observing my patients when they are in recovery from addiction.
But I keep reading in the hope I will find a new key to unlock the magic of doing things daily. One concept covered in all these books is the idea of redesigning the environment to decrease friction for good habits and to increase friction for bad habits.
Environmental design can also set a context that is associated with the habit. One location for each purpose. Perhaps that rocking chair in my living room can be my designated writing place.
So far, I haven’t done well at checking things off on my habit tracker, and I’m okay with that. My goal is that by the end of the year, I will have figured out how to be doing these things daily: meditate, write, do yoga, exercise, read.
The benefits: calm, pages toward my memoir, flexibility and balance, strength, and knowledge. These benefits will accrue without being specific goals, but they’re all consistent with my identity, with my understanding of who I am.
This week, I was asked to speak at the AtlantiCare World AIDS Day Remembrance Ceremony. I’ve written about World AIDS Day before, as an illustration of teamwork in healthcare and as an example of attending to grief. I think what I like best about World AIDS Day is that it acknowledges that professional caregivers are affected by loss, too.
In my first years in the HIV clinic, in the late 90s, the clinic staff would sit in a circle and light a candle (open flames were still allowed back then), and we would read the names of all the patients we had lost that year. Back then, it wasn’t unusual to lose twenty or more patients in a year.
(more…)The feeling of connection with my readers is what keeps me writing week after week. Today, I rediscovered the website of another woman physician, Dr. Catherine Cheng, whose blog is titled Healing Through Connection. She is an internist from Chicago, and she participated in National Blog Post Month (NaBloPoMo) for the fourth time this year.
During the month of November 2019, her series of posts on “things that make me better” is impressive and inspiring. I can relate to many of the things that make her better, which range from teaching Medical Students to Journaling.
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I’ve been a productive writer recently, even if I haven’t been able to keep up the pace for NaNoWriMo. After five months of working with my book coach, the structure of my memoir is beginning to take shape. In my naivete, I’d hoped to have the first draft done at the end of the six months.
For a couple of weeks, I was depressed when I saw that wasn’t going to happen. I have lots of words on paper, but most of them will probably not make it into the book. My time, words, and energy have not been wasted, though. I am learning new things, and despite the emotional difficulty of writing about my own life, I am really enjoying this process.
I am far away from decisions about publishing and marketing, but I’m in a virtual support group of writers who are at those stages, who have been through those processes before. I can see that beyond this hard stage of learning to write a book, there is another stage and yet another one beyond that.
As I write into it, my memoir keeps shapeshifting. In the latest iteration, it’s about the transformation from doctor to writer. The truth is that I’m both. I’ve moved from being a doctor who writes to being a writer who works part-time as a doctor. Sometimes, it’s not easy to put myself into compartments.
Yesterday was supposed to be a writing day, but I was pulled back into the doctor world more than once. I began the day by driving into the clinic to give a 30-minute lecture to the residents. The physical activity of talking for 30 minutes to a group of engaged and attentive residents was rewarding, but still an effort for me, the introvert.
(more…)For many writers, November is National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. The goal is to finish a 50,000 word first draft of a novel by the end of the month. I am not writing a novel, but I am taking advantage of the collective energy to do a modified NaNoWriMo for my memoir.
I don’t expect that I can keep up with writing 1667 words a day for 30 days. In fact, I’m already behind, but I am writing more than I normally would, and I’m finally feeling the pull toward daily writing. In the most recent pages I sent to my book coach, I included a snippet of one of my poems that illustrates the Taoist concept of empty space.
a reed raft, a reed flute
both useful in their hollowness.
I had a busy, fun- and food-filled weekend visiting family in New England. Being away from my regular schedule and environment had a detrimental effect on my discipline. The habits I had cultivated over the past year were becoming unsteady even before this trip, but last weekend, the scales tipped far over toward disorder.
This week in the New Yorker, Jerome Groopman wrote about the science of building good habits. Very little of the process is based on willpower. The secret to keeping promises to yourself for maintaining good habits is to manipulate your environment, to make it easier to do the right thing.
Copyright Irina Kryvasheina
In my last phone call with my book coach, she was giving me suggestions for getting more of my inner landscape on the page. She said, “Readers don’t want to read about when things are going well for you. They want to read about pain, about how you overcame it to move forward.”
I had written a scene in which I took my son to the emergency room. She said, “I’ve been in the emergency room with my kids. Describe the fear and worry that you felt.” I went back in my memory to my feelings at the time. (more…)