Why I'm Not Dr. Bad Art Every Day, MD
A small reflection on writing about lifestyle and wellbeing online without stating the fact immediately that I'm a physician, and why it's the right approach for me
As we move into winter, every year I think about what got me started in social media. A cold winter in Boston as an intern in a pediatrics rotation (aka 6am-6 pm) made me feel like I was learning a lot as a doctor, but losing the whimsical and creative parts of me that I didn’t have time for in that part of training. It was dark out whenever I was not in the hospital, and those shifts felt like 12 straight hours of the highest brain activity I could possibly put out. It was actually not unenjoyable, as I worked with new friends on a team and was treating adolescent and eating disorder patients. I was deeply engrossed, but I was aware of the playful part of me that I had always felt did not belong within the white coat.
For my own enjoyment, I knew I still needed to play and make good (or bad) art. I loved (and still love) Taylor Swift, am a romantic in all senses, and was on prom planning committee in high school. From all of this, you can get that I love a theme and love to love. I decided to start on TikTok by writing about living by the themes in the songs of Lover by Taylor Swift. Mostly, it was a challenge or devotion for me to keep thinking about things besides what I saw and learned in the hospital. It grew a few thousand followers in a month, which was huge traction for me at the time. TikTok has been mostly positive for me as a vehicle for creativity and expression, and I suspect it’s because my life has been busy and I love my clinical work. Since that time, I’ve grown my TikTok outside of the Taylor Swift niche mostly by continuing to post about lifestyle, habits, and pop culture themes I love.
When I began posting, I didn’t want my social media writing to be about medicine. I thought they needed to be separate anyway, and I was doing it to have access to the imaginative, VH1-loving, tumblr-having teen part of myself. At 26, I knew that I needed to hold that part of myself a little more tenderly and with a bit more celebration. I still thought it and medicine were separate.
Additionally, as stated, I WAS AN INTERN!
What did I know? Even at the time, I saw and knew of the misinformation around mental health online. I myself had fallen prey to some overpromising guides and coaches, and my early 20s library loan history was littered with self-help. As I still sometimes glibly say, it isn’t imposter syndrome if you truly are not yet skilled at something (which was developmentally normal for an intern!). I did not feel equipped to speak to a non-specific audience about psychiatry. Even as a board-certified adult psychiatrist now, I tend to lean away from generalizations or specific advice. Navigating mental health is like navigating giving someone directions to a place: the same advice that would get one person closer to where THEY want to be could bring another person in the totally wrong direction. If I send out information to a broad general public in the form of even longer social media posts, the algorithm doesn’t show it to people who it is the most accurate for. Algorithms direct what you see based on what is most salient—and salience can be an anxiety compulsion, a trigger of trauma, a video or idea coherent with the negative evaluation that depression causes in one’s cognitions. I felt MUCH more confident to talk about Taylor Swift albums, and eventually, confident in talking about small ways to try to be more creative, organized, and present like the good books and magazines I had once read as a teen (not the self-help book era though).