Finding Creativity in Your Environment

The first Graduate School assignment of the term

Here’s a secret I’ve accidentally been keeping.

I would be a student for the rest of my life if money grew on trees.

I love to learn.

I love to work hard.

I love assignments and feedback and due dates and grades.

I guess it’s probably not a surprise, if you know me well.

I finished my Masters degree back in the spring of 2013, and I’ve thought several times since then about expanding my education. Back in 2023, I was the Manager of Patient Advocacy for a small Biotech Pharma company, and they offered tuition reimbursement for continuing education. That’s when I quite literally stumbled across the Certification of Professional Achievement program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, and I knew that there was no better fit for me than that.

I took my first course in the Spring of 2013 - the foundation cornerstone of the program “Narrative Medicine Methods: Close Reading and Creative Writing,” and my second - an elective called “Disability and Illness Narratives: Storytelling for Awareness and Activism” in the fall of that same year. I was enthralled with learning again, with the opportunity to connect with other like minded folks, and to push my writing in new ways, personally and professionally.

In 2024, I took a leave of absence from the program to focus on the myriad of health challenges I was required to face. But now I’m back, and I’m taking the class I’ve coveted since I was accepted into the program: “Writing Creatively, Craft Lab + Workshop.”

Today, I completed my first assignment of the term:

As you move through your week, pay close attention to your environments and what you see around you. Choose one or two “things” (for lack of a better term, though your “things” need not be visible or concrete) that you come across that strike you as a poem or a work of art. This exercise is designed to examine your creative triggers. What are the things that move you or draw you to them?

Describe, in prose (or take a picture if it's visual and you're able to), the “poem” that you found out in the world. Your found poem/art should NOT be what is traditionally thought of as a poem.

Explicate--again in prose--why it strikes you as a poem. This will not be easy, but please try to dig as deep as you can, and don't worry if you are not coherent!

& I felt moved by my own writing.

Let’s be honest - this isn’t something that happens often, so I decided to share it here as well. I hope it makes you feel something too.

After the waiting room

This waiting room
Is not just a place to wait.
It is a place to gather my thoughts.
To follow the pattern on the rug with my eyes, over and over and over again until my name is called. To notice the subtle neutral colors, and think about how nothing about this experience is subtle or neutral.

This waiting room feels safe.
It's quiet and it's clean and it's aesthetically pleasing, but it's more than that.

This waiting room is a portal, after check in, before medicine.
Medicine that changed my life.
Medicine that saved my life.

This waiting room is poetic in the way it holds space
Sometimes it's empty.
Sometimes it's just me.
Sometimes, there's someone waiting for their loved one to come out of treatment.
I have to imagine, much like myself, they are begging the universe to let this help. To let this preserve lives. To let this save lives.

This waiting room holds hope.
It extends an invitation.
It feels like it creates a border between the harsh and the soft, the fear and the dream, the wait and the win.

I've sat in this waiting room on 26 different occasions to date, and each time I have found that eventually, the exhale comes.
The poem is in the exhale.
The poem is in the moments between what was, and what could be.
The poem is in the hardest work done after the medicine is over.
The poem is in the returning, over and over and over again.

This room feels like a script for my feelings, a subconscious process that happens in the short time I sit and wait.
When I'm alone, I feel most at ease.
When I'm not, I try to observe.
What is she feeling? Is he nervous? When will they know if things are getting better? When did I know?

When my name is called, I stand and walk around the corner. 
I find my treatment room, and I settle in for the next hour of time. 
But that settling, it always comes after the waiting room.

The waiting room is the poem, it's the portal between the outside world and the inside shelter.
It's the place in which all things are calm.
Nothing can happen until after I've sat in the waiting room.