You are invited to share your stories of resilience, strength, heartbreak, isolation, and empowerment. We have created this space because stories help connect us, and can decrease our sense of isolation. Sharing stories has always been a central feature of communication. Storytelling facilitates teachable moments, enhances understanding, and helps reduce stigma. This page reflects us. Come back often. Share. Feel less alone. Laugh. We hope that you will contribute to this growing collection.
Tobias Spears, Director of Diversity Initiatives
Candice Norcott, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
“I’m writing my story so that others might see fragments of themselves.” – Lena Waithe
“Telling our story does not merely document who we are, it helps to MAKE us who we are.” – Rita Charon
“Find the good. It’s all around you. Find it, showcase it and you’ll start believing in it.” – Jesse Owens
Ideas for Writing Styles
- Whatever you want using five sentences or less.
- Tell—in 55 words exactly—a story that helps us to understand, or to appreciate, something about your experience of COVID-19. Limiting yourself to 55 words can help you to cut to the essence of your story.
- Uses the format of a letter to address someone or something with whom you have had a challenging/inspiring relationship or difficult/uplifting encounter. The letter can be a
- Thank you
- Expression of feelings
- Request for forgiveness
- Goodbye
- A haiku is a Japanese form of poetry that uses a very specific format to convey an image and poetic expression.
- To write in the haiku technique, choose a memorable setting, experience or scene. Write down images that convey this experience. Write 3 Lines – 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables.
- Haiku poems often embody nature imagery and are in the present tense, with an association between images.
- Adopts the patient’s (family member’s/supervisor’s/colleague’s) point of view
- Describes key events, interactions
- Write in the first person voice (“I”), relating that person’s perspective, thoughts, feelings about a recent encounter, or other event
- Use information actually known about the other from past encounters, but also imagine aspects of the person’s life/perspective that are unknown
- Protect identity of person
*Stories will appear below. We reserve the right to select and/or edit stories to maintain confidentiality.
Your Stories and Submissions
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy.” —Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
-Gail, ENT
“Shelter in place”
Rain batters the roof
We open shuttered windows
Earth, flowers enter
-Karen Jackson, Faculty Affairs
Life once ran the same old route
We’d work, eat food and work out
Wow, how things have changed
Our lives rearranged
Visions for a world inside out.
-Candice Norcott, Psychiatry
“We are not zoom”
Your face before me
A thousand remote pixels
Our hands touch the screen
-Karen Jackson, BSD Faculty Affairs
a virus cares not
about ideologies
neither do vaccines
-Stanley Boyson, Facilities
I was talking to my supervisors about someone in my household being ill and they showed such concern and compassion for someone they had never met. They also helped direct me to resources for that person, even though the person who was ill doesn’t even work at UChicago.
-Beatrix M., BSD Diversity & Inclusion
Sketches by Dr. Royce Lee from Graphic Medicine Workshop
