At the end of our first session of our inaugural The Proximity Project: Healthcare cohort, tears unexpectedly filled my eyes as I shared a personal healthcare story that I hadn’t shared publicly before.
We had just finished an exercise where our participants were asked to be vulnerable and share formative experiences in small groups on Zoom.
We start The Proximity Project with such activities because we know how powerful vulnerability, transparency, and authenticity are for bringing people closer.
Coming out of that activity, participants shared how cathartic and refreshing it was to move beyond talking about people’s professional titles and accomplishments to check in on a personal level.
There can be so much going on in the lives of our colleagues or the people we serve that we never learn about because we don’t create space in professional settings to connect as humans and not automatons.
That’s when I pushed myself to also be vulnerable with the group about a related experience.
In 2013, my wife and I went to Cambridge, Massachusetts so I could participate in a three-day training that was part of my fellowship with the Strategic Data Project at Harvard University.
During one of the nights after I finished a full day of sessions, we were enjoying a pleasant evening watching a movie in the hotel room when the night turned tragic.
My wife, who was three months pregnant at the time, went to the bathroom before we were headed to bed and noticed she was bleeding profusely.
We called the ambulance and we were hurried to a local hospital with every expectation that we would be losing our baby whose heart beat we heard just a month prior. It was a heartbeat that lifted our spirits after we had a stillborn son in 2010.
But the heartbeat stopped and we left the hospital in the wee hours of the morning with what became the second of several miscarriages before we had our first liveborn child in 2015.
Later that morning, as my wife rested in the hotel room, I showed up on cue at 8am to participate in a full day of sessions. I did not let anyone on to the pain my wife and I were carrying.
When we had our stillborn son a few years earlier, I remember my wife getting docked points on a paper for her doctoral program that she turned in a day late that week. I encouraged her to share with the professor why she was late but she decided to keep it to herself.
There are so many pieces of ourselves — often positive but sometimes painful — that we are told in subtle or not so subtle ways are not allowed in professional settings.
This creates distance, cultures of silent struggle, and the sentiment that we care more about someone’s utility than their humanity.
But there’s another way.
After just a few hours together virtually in The Proximity Project, I noted that I could already feel love, connection, healing, and community forming among our cohort of physicians, psychologists, healthcare executives, nonprofit leaders, and students.
It was a beautiful, revolutionary sight that will undoubtedly send ripples throughout the spheres of influence of members of our cohorts.
And I’m ready for so much more of it.
Thank you for the vulnerability of this post and reflecting on how we can and should all create spaces to remind us of our commonality, which is we are all connected as human beings.