Category Archives: writing

Chengerisms and NaBloPoMo 2024

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“Hey friend, favor?
“When you think of me, what things do you hear me say all the time that signify to you who I am and what I’m about? 🤔
“…Collecting ‘Chengerisms’”

The compulsion overtook me Thursday evening, when I should have been finishing clinic notes and packing for LA. I texted a slew of people in a flurry with the question above, intending to assemble their answers into backbone for National Blog Posting Month in November. For those who don’t know, NaBloPoMo challenges bloggers to publish 30 posts in 30 days, all written in real time. It coincides with NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, a sprint to write a 50K word manuscript in the same time.

This will be my tenth consecutive NaBloPoMo challenge–BRING IT, I say!

My “Chengerisms” query, I see now, was actually me gathering validation and support for showing up all me, all in, BOOBS OUT at the Writers Rising retreat this weekend. My subconscious intuition knows what I need; I sense, trust, and follow better with age. Replies rolled in with speed, earnestness, and so much love it positively bowled me over. Highly recommend!

The strongest messages I perceived throughout the conference reinforced all of my highest writing and living values:
Let loose your curiosity
Take risks
Tell the truth
Honor your Central Self
Own Your Shit
You are enough
Assemble your pit crew
Connect, connect, connect!

How tightly these correlated with the Chengerisms my friends mirrored to me:
What is that about?
How fascinating!
Tell me more…
Hey friend
How did that feel?
Love you love you
Yaaaay!
One breath
Walk the talk
BOOBS OUT (apparently catching on in my small circles–yaaaayy!)
Tribe
Sooo human.

This spontaneous, subconscious-driven exercise shows me the profound importance of good, loving feedback and the absolute value of meaningful relationship. My response to almost every reply was a sincere and heartfelt, “I feel seen!”

While I continually noodle on content and structure of Book (I’m getting closer, really!), I feel a limbic and visceral certainty about how I want readers to feel throughout and especially at the end–seen, validated, inspired, empowered, and convicted. This NaBloPoMo, I aim to color in and sharpen that vision, saturate my thinking and writing brain with it.

At the end of an executive physical, I want my patient to feel thoroughly understood. I show that I know them, even if I only see them once a year, by reflecting their stories back to them, interpolating and extrapolating what’s not said, checking in, and providing what I know patients need from their doctors: personal connection in service of self-efficacy for health. So this year for NaBloPoMo, I commit to the theme:

What I Wish For You

Thirty things I want patients, readers, or anyone, really, to experience after encountering me in person or in print. Chengerisms in action. I will resist wallowing in guilt and shame when I notice how often I fall short of these aspirations. When I see perfectionist self-loathing approach I will divert it to the nearest off-ramp. All part of the process.

This could be both fun and enlightening! Let’s see what happens, eh? Ready, set, let’s go.


I Just Want to Talk to People and Write About It

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WAIT—I already do this! 

All day, every day at work I talk to people.  I query their perceptions about their health, their habits, relationships, and leadership.  I ask about their families, challenges, and struggles.  We get as personal as they are willing, and it is always a privilege and honor to be allowed into people’s lives like I am.  Between the pre-call, the morning interview, and the debrief, I spend about two hours with each patient during their annual exam, reviewing the year past and anticipating the year ahead.  The best days end with me feeling joyously spent, having attuned and attended to each patient intently while mining all my cumulative expertise, both personal and professional, to compile the most collaborative, relevant, and holistic action plan I can muster.

I have saved face sheets from these annual exams for the past year, all the encounters that felt meaningful to me.  Each paper bears my notes from the interview, essentially a list of ideas/concepts, resources, and recommendations to include on the action plan.  It’s a set of organic notes for myself, a record of how I know each person, what stands out about their life today, the most salient aspects of health and relationships this year.

Internal Medicine is a ‘cognitive’ field—we don’t do procedures.  “I think, therefore I.M.” my American College of Physicians mug says.  I literally talk to people for a living.  And then I write about it.  Each clinic note reports my patient’s state of being, in the context of their life at the time.  Every year I add on to the cumulative ‘social history’—work, eating and exercise patterns, sleep, stress, and relationships.  Reading through that section of the note, I can see how many years I have known the patient, and how each of these aspects of their health has evolved over time.  They rise in the ranks of work, change jobs.  Weight fluctuates.  Kids grow up, graduate, leave home and go to college, get married.  Grandchildren accumulate.  My annual exam note is the record of a person’s life as I hear it.

Each encounter note’s ‘Assessment and Plan’ is essentially a problem list with my description of each active medical issue, interpretation of potential causes and implications, and plan of care.  It serves to guide anyone who cares for the patient in the future (myself included) and to inform patients themselves, so they may know the rationale behind my recommendations.

This past week, I started a new journal to document each encounter for my own benefit—to recall and reflect on each interaction and log my own perceptions (intellectual, relational, visceral, and otherwise) and insights.  Each entry ends with the heading “FEELING”—my attempt to articulate how the encounter affected me personally, what meaning I derived from it.  I LOVE this new practice.

Similarly, I have often journaled feverishly after conversations with my best friends—the deep, philosophical, and bonding ones wherein I grab my journal in real time to jot ideas, insights, and epiphanies.  My days off fill up with calls and coffee dates well in advance, and I now set aside time after each of these encounters to make similar recordings to those after my patients’ annual exams.  Between friends who have known me decades (‘stem cell friends’, as I have named them this week) to lovely new ones who may be decades younger or made in specific contexts (‘tissue friends’), the connections made of late flourish as if doused in Miracle Gro concentrate.  And I’m writing it all down!

This blog will be ten years old in April.  This is the 630th post.  It all started because I wanted to write a book on physician-patient relationship and how to save it.  And yet the focus, content, and organization of Book has eluded me all this time.  But it’s okay; I’m having so much fun with the process, feeling my way through, attending to and reveling in each twist and turn of the journey.  I’m getting closer.  I have no deadline or expectation, no goal other than fostering and honoring what emerges from the most organic and authentic places within me, for no other reason than to connect with people for whom it will be meaningful.

I talk to people.  I listen.  I connect.  I write about it for all our benefit, so our bonds may hold strong long after each encounter, cumulatively, in the most intersecting and inclusive ways.  I do it for a living—not just for an income, but for my very livelihood—I traffic in the spoken and written word to make the highest, deepest connections and meaning in life.  Wow, what a duh-HA! revelation.  And how lucky that my life calling and profession should align so perfectly? 
Book will come eventually, I am confident.  I can feel it. 
Onward.

Women Elevating Women

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How is everybody this fine August evening?

How is it August already!? *sigh* I hope we have all savored the summer (here in the Northern Hemisphere) and all it has to offer. There is just something about the longer, brighter days–I know there are myriad researched psychophysiologic effects, but I’m too lazy to look them up. Happy to just revel in them! Energy, activity, growth, flourishing–we humans are part of nature… Life occurs in seasons, and the lushness of summer blooms, the bees’ bumble-busy-ness, watching kids play joyously outside–it all just activates me, makes me frankly elated.

So today I got particularly excited thinking about how women romance authors hold one another up. I have noticed it for a while, and it hit me anew this afternoon. Here’s the story:

Shane East has joined the Creator crew over on Quinn, ‘the app for audio erotica.’ [To read more about this relatively new medium and its social value, see this article from the New York Times and a brief interview with Quinn founder and CEO Caroline Spiegel.] He joins other well known romance narrators on the site such as John York and Zachary Webber. The short form stories are apparently extremely spicy, and people love them. Scripts for the audios vary in origin, written by the voice actors themselves (men, women, and nonbinary folks), established romance authors, and fans alike. Not every piece is explicitly credited.

Shane’s debut on Quinn has been widely anticipated and very well received: As of this writing, about 60 hours out, his first audio has garnered over 4100 plays and almost 800 subscribers. Amidst the deluge of praise, I happened to catch an Instagram story posted by romance author Elodie Hart, acknowledging her good friend Holly June Smith for writing Shane’s inaugural script. It struck me again how often this happens in the romance world.

I see authors regularly promote one another’s work in their weekly newsletters and social media accounts. These magnanimous women include Sara Madderson, Nana Malone (who also co-founded Audio in Color, a non-profit dedicated to increasing diversity and representation in the romance and audiobook industry), Marni Mann, Sierra Simone, Lauren Smith, and Lili Valente. They post about how they collaborate, commune, and just have fun creating together. How wonderful! How generous, loving, and mutually beneficial! Is there any other profession where this happens so commonly?

I think about athletes, thought leaders… It always makes me happy to see blended teams play together in Olympic and All-Star games. Simon Sinek directly addresses his rivalry with Adam Grant in his book The Infinite Game. He frames this competitive relationship positively, as it drives his own professional excellence. In academic research, where resources are limited and science moves quickly, the culture is the opposite of collaborative and mutually admiring–‘cut throat’ is often the prevailing attitude.

Is there no sense of competition in romance writing? I have no idea. I just notice the love of women holding up other women.

I have written before about allyship, especially men of women. Shane East consistently upholds and amplifies his female colleagues, and continues to do so on this new platform.
How would it be if we all amplified one another, in humility and generosity, regardless of gender? Is that realistic? There are still so many gender-based power and status dyamics in multiple (most? all?) domains of human relationship… And yet, we can’t know how social norms will change unless we challenge them, right? Romance and erotica still make a lot of folks very uncomfortable; hence the heavily guarded anonymity of some creators. I understand and respect this; I feel minimal urgency to change it, because I see the tide turning, accelerating toward mainstream cultural sex positivity every year. In my mind, this makes gender parity more likely in the far future. Every little step counts. I know this is just my own perspective, having immersed in the romance world only recently. Maybe that’s why I feel compelled to write about it often, to express my own solidarity and allyship with the progress of sexual and relational freedom for all.

Challenging the status quo does not have to be adversarial, or even direct. Romance novels don’t change social policy. I don’t imagine it’s many authors’ primary objective to activate readers and listeners to lobby Congress or protest in the streets. As throughout history, fiction illuminates humanity and speaks, however quietly yet forcefully, to our very souls. It moves us, sometimes ineffably and other times powerfully, to examine and act. Social change happens in drifts and then shifts, slow and then fast, with forward and backward steps, on a long, jagged arc toward acceptance and inclusion. Human relationships are more complex now than before, and also fundamentally unchanged: we are all here to love one another and help us all live our best lives.

I never would have guessed that my whimsical romance obsession would yield deep and divergent thought and personal evolution. The friendships, the discussions, the self-discovery and intricate connections to shared humanity—it has all been just such a gift, I get goose bumps.

As we enter this last stretch of summer sun and warmth, I sincerely wish for us all to notice humans treating other humans well. It’s okay to feel cynical about humanity, even most of the time. But let’s not allow this to close us off to opportunities for connection when they occur. In fact, I encourage us to actively seek those opportunities–I promise, they are everywhere.