How to build a creative practice while working in medicine
Is this thing on?
I still feel like I don’t really know what I’m doing. In the past six months, though, I have taken more film photos and done more shoots for people than I have in years. In that time I’ve also been working in a very busy surgery group.
This past month, I did a shoot with a friend in Cayucos post-call. The light was absolutely gorgeous, with the sort of warm quality that makes everything look softer. We had managed to squeeze it in, as she was about to travel for several months. The day before, I had gotten three hours of sleep and fielded 75 phone calls in a 24-hour period on top of rounding and operating. It was also no question for me that chasing that morning light was worth it — it brought me more joy than I’d felt in a while.
The problem here is that medicine takes everything. Identity, schedule, emotional bandwidth. There is so little time off in surgery, and the little time we do have is often spent trying to feel vaguely normal. This is a little better than in residency, but many of my friends who are new attending physicians have echoed the grind is still very much a grind. Most physicians who had creative lives before residency quietly let them go — not because they wanted to, but because there’s only so much one person can do at once.
When I started this job, I wanted to have a creative life and not make medicine the only part of myself that mattered. I chose to move to California not only for the ocean, but because so much of my time in cities previously was spent consuming — eating out, drinking, buying things. All of these are connected with wonderful memories. But what I really wanted was to create, to put things out into the world, and to find other people who were doing the same.
This has been one of the most protective things against burnout for me. What it actually looks like in practice: I shoot at 6:30 am not only because the light is wonderful, but because our workday starts at 7. I keep my cameras in the car and shoot directly after work — if I go home and sit down on the couch, I will immediately fall asleep. I try to take at least one photo every day just to keep the eye sharp. On weekends I plan one full shoot for people and am intentional about setting these up rather than waiting for them to happen. And I carve out roughly one hour a day for something creative — editing in Lightroom, looking for inspiration from other photographers, writing, posting, learning. Most of the time it’s less than I’d like and messier than I’d planned. But doing literally something snowballs. It adds up in ways that are hard to see until suddenly you look back and six months have passed and you’ve made more work than you have in years.
The biggest thing, though, has been sharing my work with friends. I’ve been on the Central Coast long enough to build community with surfers and artists alongside my day job. Photographing people and being able to give them those images as a gift has been one of my greatest joys. And many of these friends are artists themselves, with so much to share in return.
Surgery and photography are not opposites. They both require us to be fully present, to see the people in front of us clearly, and to work with our hands. Creative work doesn’t take away from clinical work — it feeds it and gives it longevity.
There are my six black hats personalities talk meowing nickname this messagemany things I’d like to do more of: learn to color grade, learn to photograph in the water, and see more of California on road trips with a film camera. The biggest limitation right now is my own energy. I’m still often very, very tired. Most people in healthcare can relate to the feeling of taking care of so many others and running on empty. At the same time, just starting will often carry you forward on its own. I’ve never left my neighborhood pottery studio and regretted going. I’ve never thought that a sleep-deprived shoot was a waste of time — if anything, the opposite.
I’d tell my younger self to not put the camera away for later.
