Hello, friends!
Have you ever felt two parts of yourself at war with each other? That you must choose between work that pays the bills and work that you find truly fulfilling? Wondering whether you must prioritize practicality over passion?
I have. For much of my life, I considered myself primarily a writer. When I was in second grade, one of our class assignments was to write a book that we would both write and illustrate. I wrote “The Parakeet Who Wanted a New Name.” It was a silly and sweet story about a parakeet who felt her name wasn’t right, and so she flew to Minnesota for a Great Owl to bestow upon her the name she felt resonated with her: Sparkle Rainbow. I wrote my story carefully, and drew the best pictures I could. The day our teacher bound the books with tape, forming a white spine along its edges, I felt prouder than I ever had.
I ran home that day with my book, smiling so broadly that my cheeks hurt, and told my parents I wanted to be a writer. That I already was a writer. I waved my book in their faces at dinnertime. They exchanged smiles and nodded, but said nothing.
I knew in my heart I was meant to be a writer.
But life happens. My parents, both Indian immigrants who fled terrible poverty to make their way to the United States, hoped for me to become a doctor. They never had a choice to privilege passion over practicality. I found myself loving biology and spent many nights studying with my mother, who is also a doctor. But what I really loved were stories. Like the ones my parents would tell me about Hindu gods and goddesses, the ones we would read in class. Or the ones I would create in my own mind when I let myself into our home on the lonely afternoons when my parents didn’t return until well into the evening. Words were my tools. Stories were my companions.
I suppressed my desire to become a professional writer in order to go to medical school. Feeling that I couldn’t deny my parents their hope for me, given what they had sacrificed to give me the life I’m privileged to have. It felt like I owed it to them and to myself to “make the most” of my education. But I never lost my reverence for stories and poetry. I cared for patients who I would later write about, separating their individual selves from their illness, imagining their lives as whole humans. I found myself aching to combine my love of language and writing with my love of caring for patients and families struggling with the impact of severe illnesses.
It was my writerly self, sometimes dormant but always present, that led me to choose to be a palliative care doctor – one who treats the physical, emotional, and spiritual pain and suffering of patients living with a serious, often terminal, disease. I am tasked not only with treating cancer pain and shortness of breath from heart failure, but also with having precise, careful conversations with patients and their loved ones about what makes their lives meaningful in the face of disease, and how I might help them to achieve what is most important to them in the time they have to live.
I consider myself to be an accidental linguist – a physician who listens deeply to patients struggling to make sense of their illness and to redefine what quality of life means to them considering the physical and emotional constraints that disease imposes on themselves and their loved ones.
When patients tell me they are “fighters” against cancer, I ask them what that means to them. When they say they want “everything” done, I ask them to help me understand what they visualize “everything” to be. I teach my medical students, residents, and fellow physicians to approach conversations with patients as procedures: we need linguistic precision just as we need surgical precision. We must strive to use our words in a helpful way, and to listen with our hearts and our minds, so that we can match our medical care plans to the values and goals seriously ill patients have for themselves.
I have learned we are all many things at once. I never needed to choose between being a writer and a doctor, but I had to learn it was okay to bring all of my selves – complicated, intertwined – to the hospital each day. It was okay to be both writerly and doctorly. Each of us contains multitudes. What would it look like for you to bring all your selves – complicated, intertwined – to your work and to those you love?
All my best,
Sunita