My best friend is an ob-gyn doctor, and when she works nights she calls me in the mornings, in the car ride home. She tells me about pre-term labors, about delivering stillborns, about women and men who weep and insist on holding their dead babies. She tells me about having to hold back her own emotions and show her patients no pain at the sight of theirs, while still managing to display and deliver empathy. She cries in the supply closet, she's found comfort in the arms of an equally emotional nurse.
I am a writer, or an aspiring writer. I don't know what it takes to earn the title. A book? A passion? My life feels shrouded in indulgence--teaching saves it from being completely so--and when juxtaposed against bringing life into the world, writing feels almost shameful.
Where does writing's necessity lie? In speaking for those who have no voice or means of expression? What of fiction, though? What of personal narrative? After the few readings I've given, people have come to the stage and thanked me for reading my work, the subject matter is important, they say. I cling to these moments, they fuel me, they allow me to see a light, or perhaps more apt, a finish line.
My best friend tells me not to feel guilty. She says to enjoy sleeping, and living, and creating. Medicine is not creative, it's like following a recipe, she says. But I can't help myself, knowing that she spends twelve hours days in hospitals and I spend mine in coffee shops.
People talk about the immortality of writers, but what of the immortality of doctors? Doesn't their lifeline extend into the generations that their deliveries help to give birth to? Both involve intimacy. The doctor is with you at your most vulnerable, the writer allows you to see your own weaknesses embodied and reflected in a character.
I came to teaching because of an inability to compartmentalize, out of a need to blend the personal and the professional, a desire to be somewhat unrestrained, more free than other careers allow. I often feel shamed by my emotional displays, embarrassed by sentimentality--why is this allowed in music but not writing? My best friend reads my work, she tries to keep me from indulging romanticism. I listen to her, and when I read my work with her sobering words in mind, I blush and want to hide forever.
I am a writer, or an aspiring writer. I don't know what it takes to earn the title. A book? A passion? My life feels shrouded in indulgence--teaching saves it from being completely so--and when juxtaposed against bringing life into the world, writing feels almost shameful.
Where does writing's necessity lie? In speaking for those who have no voice or means of expression? What of fiction, though? What of personal narrative? After the few readings I've given, people have come to the stage and thanked me for reading my work, the subject matter is important, they say. I cling to these moments, they fuel me, they allow me to see a light, or perhaps more apt, a finish line.
My best friend tells me not to feel guilty. She says to enjoy sleeping, and living, and creating. Medicine is not creative, it's like following a recipe, she says. But I can't help myself, knowing that she spends twelve hours days in hospitals and I spend mine in coffee shops.
People talk about the immortality of writers, but what of the immortality of doctors? Doesn't their lifeline extend into the generations that their deliveries help to give birth to? Both involve intimacy. The doctor is with you at your most vulnerable, the writer allows you to see your own weaknesses embodied and reflected in a character.
I came to teaching because of an inability to compartmentalize, out of a need to blend the personal and the professional, a desire to be somewhat unrestrained, more free than other careers allow. I often feel shamed by my emotional displays, embarrassed by sentimentality--why is this allowed in music but not writing? My best friend reads my work, she tries to keep me from indulging romanticism. I listen to her, and when I read my work with her sobering words in mind, I blush and want to hide forever.
