My lovely co-residents and I have been continuing our book club throughout the pandemic. In this period of such loneliness, it is a balm to be entrenched in a story and to form relationships with the characters; this is in addition to the monthly discussions and group texts. And bless my friends for regularly choosing works of fiction that I would have never read otherwise.
I recently had the opportunity to speak to a group of undergraduate students at Ohio State about narrative medicine. One of the questions they asked me was how, in this tumultuous time of a global pandemic, climate change, racial reckoning, the threatening of the rights of trans individuals, etc., I use narrative medicine as a physician to advocate for my patients and otherwise. First of all, what an excellent question. Secondly, I realized in that moment that reading literature not only helps me build my overall empathy (see previous discussion of the data on this), but that these books expose me to the experiences of human beings I may never interact with otherwise.
We read Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, a novel about a family of Ghanaian immigrants in Alabama ravaged by depression and addiction and grief. We read The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, a portrait of twin girls who are Black, but pass as White, growing up in the American South and the disparate trajectories of their lives as shaped by individual decisions. The last book we read was The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim, the story of a single Korean immigrant mother and a Korean-American daughter who spent their lives struggling to understand one other.
All of these stories and the characters therein are completely fictional, but I feel like I know them. They are fully formed humans to me, which speaks to the effectiveness of the writing, absolutely, but also to the power of storytelling in general. In fact, as a doctor, I have met some of these characters in real life. Reading fiction provides me with a lens through which I can see my patients in more than 15-minute segments. The fear that one lives with being undocumented. The constant stress of living with a child or sibling with addiction. The pervasive generational trauma of poverty.
And writing does the same thing. When we consume or create any type of art, we become more connected to one another as human beings. We add beauty and joy to our lives. And we find a way to release emotions we never knew were there.
I was reminded of this while reading The Last Story of Mina Lee. Margot, the titular character’s daughter, picks up her old notebook and pencil from her childhood desk and begins to draw for the first time in years. She is struck by the fact that she has always loved art, to create, and to tell a story with her work. But the concept of creating art just for art’s sake seemed so foolish and impractical given her upbringing in a world where her neighbors were struggling to survive. But she reconciles these two things.
“Yet, everyone needed art. Why else did her mother assign so much care into the fruit that she sliced, that long peel of skin, a ribbon that revealed the tenderness of the flesh inside? Or the tiny flick of her eyeliner that she angled perfectly in the mirror, the arrangement of the outfits that she hung on the walls of her store.”1
We all need art and beauty, and we find ways to incorporate it into our lives even if we don’t realize it. How we do this can help us learn about ourselves, just like Margot was able to better understand her mother.
The prompt for this week is this:
“Write about the little pieces of art you create every day.”
You have as much or as little time as you would like.
References:
- Jooyoun Kim, N. The Last Story of Mina Lee. Park Row Books; 2020, p. 257.
More unedited writing of mine. Ten minutes about the pieces of art I create every day.
Nephrons
But why is my child swollen?
How do the kidneys work?
Why is his urine frothy?
Why did this happen?
How do I explain
In 10 minutes
What took me years to understand?
Well, he’s losing protein from his kidneys,
Yes they do look like beans.
No, they do so much more.
There is something called a basement membrane
In the glomerulus
And it filters blood
And the size of the pores
Well not just the size…
The words are
Jumbles of letters with no meaning.
But I mean to say so much.
So I draw.
The nephron is a marvel of nature.
So I sketch it as such,
Basking in its beauty,
It’s utility.
Art for education,
But also to remind myself
How lucky we are to exist.
Every stroke of the pen,
No matter how practical,
Allows me to share this beauty
With someone else.
What a miracle.
Writing for Wellness 