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.

The news is positive. “So far, so good. Bloodwork steady,” he says, still looking at the screen.

I am silent.

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

I am relieved but the words still don’t come.

He stands and heads for the door.

I am still sitting as he steps into the hallway.

There is this strange, elongated moment. Why can’t I move? Why can’t I speak?

A step, but then 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.

His statement takes on form and stands between us in the office for a moment, alive and breathing and as real as anything else.

But then I remember all our visits before, during, after treatment when we’d talked about my poetry, and the music he writes when he isn’t wearing a white coat, and how hard it is to balance a creative life against a working one.

And he’s gone.

He is not the first person to challenge me to own my creative life. I’ve heard it my whole life — from family, friends, teachers, bosses, even an ex-husband whom I had frustrated throughout our marriage because I could never quite seem to complete a project.

But for twenty-seven years, I also had this other life — as a New York City school teacher and leader. That life was visible. Demanding. High-profile. I had a mission, measurable goals, and a public purpose.

And there would be time to write, I had always 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.

And now? What would be different?

I look around at the monitor, the exam table, the blood pressure machine. Time no longer feels so abstract. Remission or not, it is suddenly measurable. Finite.

I gather my things. I call my family. I get on the elevator going twelve floors down.

Creativity is your baseline.

I make the two-hour drive home.

Creativity is your baseline.

What am I going to do with it?