Wow! I love this, Mara. I had no idea about your piece in Modern Love or your journalism fellowship at NPR. I haven't taught it in awhile because my job was so demanding, but I used to teach Social Media for Writers. Just a community class here in Nashville. If you ever want to air any of this out, I'm happy to listen! I hope you write that book!
This is a great piece. I'm interested to read more about your relationship with writing and with your doctor identity at the bedside. Cultivating a digital identity, an exercise completely new to me after over a decade of trying to have the smallest possible online footprint, is a very strange experience after years of comfortably inhabiting my bedside identity.
I'm trying to be a good observer of how they overlap and also how they misalign.
The 'me' a family gets after a difficult resuscitation at 4am is not the exact same 'me' that a reader gets when I've had time to sit and edit my thoughts for writing.
Is one more genuine because it is unedited? Or is the other more real because it is freed from the exigencies and pains of working in a strained system at 4am and uncoupled from institutional mandates?
I'm able to say things in writing I couldn't say at the bedside, which is a freedom and a responsibility and a gift. But I have a lot more comfort in navigating being a bedside clinician and then disappearing, immediately, into the crowd as soon as I'm out of my scrubs. It's much harder to disappear from an online persona, for better or worse.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful comment, Vicky. So much to unpack!
I think the doctor identity is changing a lot. I'm not a rural family doc who does house calls on my patients and knows all of my patients from church. (Or synagogue :) Many of my patients see me for care, but they also use telehealth companies and urgent cares and yes, emergency rooms. Their relationship with me is one of many, for better or worse.
There's also "doctor as corporate employee" to contend with. Med school faculty might have some kind of gesturing towards free speech and academic inquiry. But there's also concern about appearing to "represent" or speak for an institution.
Wow! I love this, Mara. I had no idea about your piece in Modern Love or your journalism fellowship at NPR. I haven't taught it in awhile because my job was so demanding, but I used to teach Social Media for Writers. Just a community class here in Nashville. If you ever want to air any of this out, I'm happy to listen! I hope you write that book!
Yes omg!!!! 😳
This is a great piece. I'm interested to read more about your relationship with writing and with your doctor identity at the bedside. Cultivating a digital identity, an exercise completely new to me after over a decade of trying to have the smallest possible online footprint, is a very strange experience after years of comfortably inhabiting my bedside identity.
I'm trying to be a good observer of how they overlap and also how they misalign.
The 'me' a family gets after a difficult resuscitation at 4am is not the exact same 'me' that a reader gets when I've had time to sit and edit my thoughts for writing.
Is one more genuine because it is unedited? Or is the other more real because it is freed from the exigencies and pains of working in a strained system at 4am and uncoupled from institutional mandates?
I'm able to say things in writing I couldn't say at the bedside, which is a freedom and a responsibility and a gift. But I have a lot more comfort in navigating being a bedside clinician and then disappearing, immediately, into the crowd as soon as I'm out of my scrubs. It's much harder to disappear from an online persona, for better or worse.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful comment, Vicky. So much to unpack!
I think the doctor identity is changing a lot. I'm not a rural family doc who does house calls on my patients and knows all of my patients from church. (Or synagogue :) Many of my patients see me for care, but they also use telehealth companies and urgent cares and yes, emergency rooms. Their relationship with me is one of many, for better or worse.
There's also "doctor as corporate employee" to contend with. Med school faculty might have some kind of gesturing towards free speech and academic inquiry. But there's also concern about appearing to "represent" or speak for an institution.
Would love to talk about this more!