Moths & Monarchs

Dr. Rita Charon talks of “narrative medicine”—a field that she defined—as the “capacity to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness.” All of us in healthcare search for some way to make sense of what we see on a day-to-day basis in our work and the world around us and narrative medicine, or storytelling, offers a path toward understanding. The process that we move through to take what is happening in our life and craft a story for sharing with others is a powerful tool not only for our own well-being, but also one that promotes compassion, empathy, and a strong sense of community.

In 2019, we held our first MedMoth storytelling event at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Seventy-five people attended—46 medical students, five residents, nine faculty members, and 15 staff members—and the vast majority agreed that the event accomplished its goals of creating an inclusive and judgment-free experience, and all said they were excited to attend another MedMoth event. Attendees felt that the space fostered connections by encouraging vulnerability and the expression of emotions in a way that is rare in medical education. The diversity of stories—from lessons learned while climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro to the revelatory experience of holding and caring for a newborn Palestinian baby—fostered empathy and captured the audience’s imagination.

Since that first night, we have held eight additional MedMoth events at MCW. I was finally brave enough to share a story for the first time in November 2023…

I imagine I was maybe six years old. Which would have made my younger sister, Christopher three years old. These were the years when the two of us went everywhere with our mom. Every trip to the co-op grocery store in Berkeley, every errand to Payless drug store, every quick walk to the café across the street to get my mom a cup of coffee. On this particular afternoon, we were both in tow when my mom popped into the stationary store down the street. I don’t remember what she was looking for, but I remember letting go of her pant leg and walking down one of the aisles while my mom, toddler on her hip, spoke with the person at the cash register. I stepped carefully, glancing back and forth between the shelves on my left and the shelves on my right. There were beautiful fountain pens—some with feathers sprouting out of the end—boxes of thank you notes with gold embossed pineapples and honeybees, and a wire carousel of greeting cards that towered above my shiny brown bowl cut.

At the end of the boxed cards aisle, there was a basket filled with small notebooks. They were all the size of a grown-up’s palm, bound with a white plastic spiral. The one on top of the pile had a picture of an orange and black monarch butterfly, wings spread, looking as if it was about to land on yellow flower. I immediately coveted it. I reached my hand toward the basket, knowing I had been vehemently instructed not to touch anything! in the store just 3 minutes before. I touched the notebook’s cover and imagined what I would write in the tiny lined pages, hidden away in the top bunk, my head holding up my yellow bedspread like a tent pole. I pictured myself writing epic stories, journaling my thoughts, doodling the names of my best friends. I wanted this notebook. I needed this notebook.

I looked toward where my mom stood at the cash register, still talking with the person behind the desk, her back turned to me. I instinctively knew that asking my mom to buy this notebook for me would be futile. I could look forward to picking out a pack of sugar-free gum from the pharmacy in the lobby of my pediatrician’s office building after my annual visit, but that was the extent of what you might call “spontaneous purchases” in our household. I had everything I needed, I was frequently reminded, and there was no arguing with that logic. I truly did have everything I needed.

Except for that butterfly notebook.

With another backward glance, my heart rate doubling, I dared myself to pick it up. I turned it over in my hands. A rectangular price tag stuck to the notebook’s cardboard back read 79 cents. Firmly out of my price range. It may as well have been a hundred dollars. With each second, the intensity of my need for this tiny notebook became more and more palpable, and more and more irrational. This notebook would change the course of my life as I knew it. It would bring a kind of happiness that had alluded me in the six years I had been on earth. It would make me a better daughter, a better sister, a better friend.

I took a deep breath and with hands now wet with sweat, I closed my fingers around the notebook and shoved it in my jacket pocket. My stomach doing flip flops, eyes downcast, I quickly shuffled back to where my mom continued to hold my now squirming sister and stood next to her, as still as a statue. An eternity later, my mom turned to leave, and I followed quietly behind her. She pushed open the front door of the store, the same bell that signaled our arrival marked our getaway, and we walked the two blocks home.

I immediately ran upstairs to the room I shared with my sister before my mom could instruct me to hang up my jacket. Pulling open the very bottom drawer of our bright orange dresser, I shoved the notebook under a pile of Cabbage Patch doll clothes I stored there. I slammed the drawer closed and turned to sit on the ground, my back pushed up against the dresser, acid rising in my throat. I sat there until I could catch my breath and then crawled up to my top bunk and cried for an hour.

I never wrote in that notebook. I never even took it out of the drawer. It remained hidden there for an unknowable number of years and then it was gone. I may be the only person on earth who, when they see a monarch butterfly, is revulsed. Its image recalls a deep sense of shame—but that shame is not related to my having stolen something, like maybe you would expect or even hope for, but rather to my having wanted something so badly.

I forgave my six-year-old self for stealing that notebook many years ago. But the wanting, the wanting is something I have yet to make peace with.