Creativity Is Your Baseline

He sits at the exam room computer terminal in his white coat, reading and translating numbers on a screen.

I am nervous and hopeful that immunotherapy has done its job.

So far, so good.

Bloodwork steady.

“You are in remission,” he tells me. “For the next six months, you don’t have cancer.”

I’ll take it, I think. I am relieved and already reaching for my phone in my mind, ready to call my family.

He stands and heads for the door.

And then there is this strange, timeless pause. He turns back and looks directly at me.

“Creativity is your baseline,” he says. “What are you going to do with it now?”

The man is not a poet. He is not a philosopher. He is an oncologist — a man of science, careful with his words. His language is precise and contained. And he is a man that listens. Throughout treatment and office visits we talked a lot about writing, poetry and music and how hard it is finding a balance between creative life and career life. His statement takes on form and stands between us in the office for a moment, alive and breathing and as real as anything else.

And yet the word that moves me is a medical term.

Creativity is your baseline — medical language.

What are you going to do with it now? — a practical question demanding a practical answer.

He wasn’t the first person to challenge me to own my creative life. I have been writing since I could hold a pen. Stories. Poems. Journals. My mother bought me a typewriter when I was ten and told me that if I was going to be a writer, I would have to learn to type. In high school, I was known as “that girl who writes.” In college, I edited the school newspaper and belonged to a literary magazine.

Creativity was never absent.

But for twenty-seven years, it lived mostly in the shadows of my role as a New York City school leader. That life was visible. Demanding. High-profile. I had a mission, measurable goals, a public purpose.

And there would be time to write, I told myself. Eventually.

Eventually arrived in 2022 when I left the school system and suddenly had all the time in the world. People closest to me said, “Now you can focus on writing. Now you can live that other life.”

But eventually could not deliver on its promise.

Because time had never really been the problem.

What stalled was the doing.

For three years, I wrestled with that truth.

So why did this moment in an exam room feel different?

Maybe it was the elephant in the room - because time no longer felt abstract. Remission or not, it was suddenly measurable. Finite.

But it was the word baseline that landed.

Baseline is not poetic language. It is clinical. It is the ground against which everything else is measured. It is not decorative. It is fundamental.

That sentence pushed me off a long-standing crossroads. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But enough.

Creativity is not something you earn once you are confident enough.

It is something you cannot help doing.

“But I can’t write,” people tell me. “I’m not an artist. I can barely draw stick figures. I can’t sing in key.”

And I tell them: you were born noticing. You learned to speak. To decode symbols. To create meaning. You are already shaping language — in journals, in drafts, in text messages to the people you love, in grocery lists written in your own shorthand.

Creativity is not only a striking photograph or a clever turn of phrase. It is the instinct to tell a story — at an open mic or across a dinner table. It is how you arrange a workspace so it feels possible to sit down. How you decorate a room so it feels like home. How you live just slightly outside the expected lines.

Creativity is your baseline.

It is something you return to.

Now what are you going to do with it?