Continued from November 2022…

Our stories, and our identities, are rarely linear. Our hearts, and their accompanying fears, worries, and aspirations, cannot be so easily cleaved to reveal what’s inside. Who we are, what makes us, us, is not distillable, dilutable, or possible to separate into its component parts, like an high school chemistry assignment. 

We are intersections and contradictions. We are mistakes, messes, and apologies. We try and fall in love and break apart and try again.  

Tell me about yourself.

Are you a talker? A watcher? A traveler? A liar? Are you someone transplanted and longing for another place? Was this world not built for you and the people who look like you, share your abilities, your language? Are you someone whose neurons fire in a pattern dissimilar to those around you? 

I bet that makes it hard, sometimes, to travel through the day. 

I’d guess that the story of that identity, your identity, its disparate parts, the way it fits together, or more likely, doesn’t, would take more than 5 neat little sentences to sum up.

Tell me about yourself. 

Our contributors this month will–and they will do so in ways that are bright and funny, painful and true, messy, complicated and beautiful.

We bring you essays this month; short reflections and long ones, on the nature of names and seasons and places lived on the process of reckoning with our identities. Gingrich’s meditation, A Seasonal Reversal, asks us to consider how time and circumstance changes the perspective, the identity of its protagonist, as does Forer’s Home(s). Jepkema’s What’s in a Name? reveals the intimacy of the body in mapping our story and revealing our trauma. Consider: what story does your name tell? What narrative is etched into your very bones?

Our visual artists take the vulnerability of our identities to new heights. Yadav’s stunning Untitled piece invokes both the strength of women and the bravery needed to continue moving forward, wherever that journey leads us. Walker’s In My Bones, peels the skin away, to reveal a dynamic image of motion and self. Todoroff’s Parts of Myself speaks to those pieces, those fragments of self that make us whole. 

Horton and Lawrence, life-long learners in the health professions, bring us visual stories. Horton’s The Long Road Home, is a series of images that tell the story of journeys and circuitous routes toward the place where we belong. In The Adult Colouring Book of Depression, Lawrence asks us to consider how our mental health shapes how we see ourselves; how our collective societal framing of psychiatric disability informs how we all move through the world–or don’t. 

My co-founder Ellie Lorenzana has also embarked on a project examining identity in the past year. She’s been interviewing health professional students for our new podcast, The Distant Moon, and over the next few weeks and months, we’ll be sharing these stories with you. Listen to the first installment today, and, as always, delight in Limi Sharif’s artistry, as our visual design lead, in illustrating the accompanying thumbnails and issue art. 

Tell me about yourself. 

It’s been a remarkable privilege to be able to share some small parts of myself with you, over these past years at Auxocardia. When the idea for this space first came to me, during my clinical year, many people told me it was impractical, impossible even, to create a creative arts space as a medical student. It was too hard, and I was too busy.

I’m grateful we didn’t listen to that advice. I’m grateful to our contributors, from our first issue to today, for being willing to expose all of the self that can be painted on a canvas or poured into an essay or poem.

I’m grateful to you, for being with us on this journey; one that has, in ways unexpected and powerful, changed my own identity and sense of self. 

For our next issue, we’ll be handing over the reigns to other students, other learners, and our current graduating leadership will transition into advisory, emeritus roles. You can learn about the amazing new members of our team also in the coming weeks as we introduce them to you. 

Tell me about yourself.

I don’t know you, nor what parts of you, were we to meet, that you’d be willing to share with me. Maybe we wouldn’t need to do any telling, any parsing of sentences, or editing of self. In this platform, at Auxocardia, we’ve been able to share common space, energy, and love of the humanities in medicine and the humanity in people.

Thank you for that. Thank you for sharing yourself with me. 

I do hope I’ll see you soon.

Take care & be well.

love, molly