man carrying woman standing on beachside

Truly.  Damn you.  You wrote a musical I tried to ignore because I never believed anything could be as good as all that hype.  I believed nothing would ever knock Les Miz off its musical pedestal.  I wouldn’t even listen to this thing until three days before our tickets to see the tour production.

And now I cannot listen to anything else!  Damn you.

Les Miz knocked to my number two.

You inspired a notion to fight for freedom – damn the cost to self.

You cause tears to well in my eyes  with quiet blubbering at the thought of something happening to my children.  Every.  Single.  Time.

I smile ear-to-ear as Hamilton yells, “Sit down, John – you fat mother——!”  because my life is full of fat mother——- to whom I would love to do the same.

And then there is Hurricane.  The storm of this life.  Violins, harp and a bell.  Delicate choices for a wrecking ball of a song.  Musical perfection.  Your lyrics have nothing to do with our current circumstances as physicians, but could just as easily be about the chaos permeating the lives of so many of my brothers and sisters in medicine.  Every day feeling like the day we could drown.  Every day, waiting for it.  Whatever it may be.

I already fell to the urge to write my way out, but you have helped turn it into an imperative that I begin catching up on 25 years of words unwritten.   You fill my head with the absurd notion I can do something just by writing.  Damn you for inspiration.  No longer waiting for it.  Can’t just wait for it.  No choice but to try and write our way out.