Things I Had Feelings About This Week, Vol. 1

As a psychiatrist in training in women's mental health, pop culture-ish writer, and podcaster (sinisterly multi-hyphenate at this point)

Hello, my dear long form readers. I hope this newsletter finds you somewhere calm, safe, and with something soothing to drink. It’s currently 30 degrees in Boston, and I am having my favorite tomato-basil soup from Tatte as I write this.

My day job is being a psychiatry resident, and during my four years of residency, I’ve been writing for fun on TikTok on how to romanticize and change small things of our daily lives. From your perspective, this may have seemed like its own thing, as I didn’t talk about my clinical work very often. From my end, they have always been deeply intertwined. What I thought and learned about during my lectures and clinical work has been the soil my writing grows from. Whether that writing is fiction or creative ways to view daily life, my life as a psychiatry trainee influenced it. Likewise, what I see and consume on social media and in physical media becomes the flavor of the metaphors I’m using that week in clinic. My thought has been always that we don’t just exist in one context—we inhabit many places and can call all of them home.

Here is the first volume of things I’ve been thinking about, in both of my jobs in physical life and virtual life. Because our podcast, How to Be Patient, launched this week, those two lives of mine are becoming more integrated. I thought sharing what I get to see being in these two niche worlds might be of interest what I like to think my ideal readers are: smart with a sense of humor, direct but with a capacity for nuance, and voracious in their use of metaphor.