Finding the Words
Board scores, job applications, wedding dances and the return
I find writing difficult. I know I’m in crowded company—most writers carry their own unease. But I have my particular version: medical training that demands precision in one register while I’m trying to find fluency in another. The blank page often defeats the initial spark of an idea. And editing can feel like a slow drift from what I first meant to say.
There’s a space between the writer I imagine being and the person I actually am carrying through the day. There’s a version of me learning, through long hours, the foundations of a career in healthcare. There’s a version of me with an incessant need to study and preparing for residency interviews. There’s the me who spends my so-called leisure on scientific articles, books, videos, and podcasts, only to feel further behind in building my scientific imagination. There’s the version of me committed to staying healthy, the one who loves time with friends. And somewhere in there, there has to be a version of me who sits and writes.
Some days the gap feels absolute.
The past few months sharpened this. I studied for medical boards and applied to psychiatry residency programs. I was writing constantly—personal statements, application essays, study notes—just not here. Each version required a different voice, I thought. And I started noticing something: I can write a paragraph that is technically sound, that does what it needs to do, and still not recognize myself in it when I read it back.
What does it mean to write in your own voice when you’re learning to write in several?
When I was a teenager, long before I thought of writing seriously, I read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. She wrote, “If you use a voice other than your own, the reader will be suspicious. You cannot write out of someone else’s inner self.”
Fifteen years later, I’m still learning what that means. I’m starting to think the act of writing is discovering your own voice—differentiating yourself through the particular combination of experiences, words, pauses, and rhythms that make something recognizably yours.
In a conversation about writing and stepping back creatively, my friend and fellow writer Carly (
) put it simply: she doesn’t want to be a writer who doesn’t write. I don’t either. More pointedly, I don’t want to be a writer who avoids the work of discovering his own voice.I’m publishing this a few days after a good friend’s wedding. We celebrated fully—with shouts and laughs and toasts that stretched late into the night. I strained my voice and lost it. Now I’m left with a rasp, a whisper, sometimes silence.
There’s a strange clarity in losing your voice physically while trying to find it on the page.
So I’m continuing. We’ll pick up the thread on Essays on Craft and Perception. From there, I’ll write about the process behind the discovery of voice, and then continue into neuroscience, psychiatry, and other ways of thinking about the humanity in it all.