A new reason to write: sharpening skill

It’s been awhile since my last post despite a valiant attempt to write consistently. In honesty, this hiatus wasn’t because of a lack of imaginative stories or groundbreaking science to highlight. It was due to an apathy stemming from a fading reason to write.

When I first began here, I thought I had a unique perspective to share and a wish for others to apply my experiences and join the health bandwagon. The ideal reader was the individual looking for a different thought in the realm of wellness and medical care—the folk who’ve tried other paths and still searched for a solution. Encountering my own deconstruction of wellness, this pharmacist’s hope was to provide some guidance for others lost in the system.

Another breeze in the wind

What I did not want to become was another breeze in the wind, adding to the noise of wellness advice. I follow numerous health gurus and other no-name blogs that speak on health and make hyperbolic statements like: Turmeric is the anti-inflammatory cancer-killer! In our attention-deficit, fact-skeptical culture, headlines like these are a must to grab attention and get visibility. And to keep readers engaged and web traffic high, writers constantly search for new content which can lead to insignificant topics being overblown. Unfortunately, true wellness science isn’t this simple nor straightforward and I doubt there will ever be a time when we can definitively say individual foods or activities taken alone will reduce illness. No new Amazonian superfood will be your salvation.

What is true is that the holistic pattern of lifestyle and environment can, and surely does reduce disease. But who wants to hear that the combination exercise, diet, stress, and where you live all incrementally contribute to health or its absence? This advice is too complicated and difficult to achieve for the general public which is why simple—yet misleading—statements about singular actions are so impressionable.

My ambivalence with writing a health and wellness blog grew as others simply overstated facts and made unprovable assumptions—and people bought in! Without misrepresenting the data I struggled to make my stories accurate, captivating, and applicable to the reader which eroded my purpose for writing and pushed me away from my initial mission.

Thinking that I was only adding to the noise of other websites trying to make a name for themselves, I thought it may be best to recede back into the depths, not to cause any more ripples in an already choppy sea. Adding confusion to wellness was furthest from my intention.

Living in a bubble

Further pulling me away from my crusade is the fact that I work for a drug-manufacturing pharmaceutical company. Gone are the day-to-day clinical hospital rounds of seeing sick people to reinforce what can happen without good nutrition and wellness habits. Instead, the interior of the pharma industry is a bubble with educated, mostly healthy individuals, and cafeterias that serve local organic kale and quinoa daily. This isn’t the crowd that needs to hear about the benefits of health and wellness because there isn’t a health and wellness problem. And without this problem, there is nothing really to change and the ideas that once filled my head about improving health diminished. Without problem and without purpose is where my blog currently sits.

So what am I doing here still writing, pulled back from the brink of website deletion? The objective at the beginning of this journey no longer drives me. I still hope for less disease and suffering, but being removed from the visible reminders and associated frustration has weakened the desire to improve individual wellness habits. Now, I see this blog serving a different purpose.

It’s for me

By being away from my blog, a more personal problem crept in, one nudging me back here. My communications skills got rusty and my sharpness in storytelling and articulation became dull, creating a real problem since my employment is in scientific communications. And something recently discovered is that I enjoy communicating—not necessarily talking or writing, but sharing ideas and getting people to see a story and context for the reasons they do something. Changing the structure or placement of ideas to create a better flow in a story or understanding how the different sources of information influence memory and recall are fascinating. This is why my blog still exists: to aide and improve my skills and work.

I still have a message to tell, as there are few people as fervent and knowledgeable about health and wellness as I and even fewer who have insights into the maniacal workings of pharma. But I am no longer driven by the need to promote my message or to intentionally change others’ behaviors. Instead, I see this space as a place to hone my craft and sharpen my blade. Communications and health are a significant and enjoyable part of my life which is why this blog still exists even if its goal has evolved.

I’ve found a new reason to get back to the keyboard. One with a different purpose in mind.