A lot of times, we look at jazz in eras. How can we not keep those eras separate and think of the language as one complete continuum? It's all interrelated, and it's all evolutionary.
I had been living with my family in France as COVID was starting to spiral out of control in Europe. I said to my wife that maybe they should come back to the States with me because I was worried about getting separated.
All that you may achieve or discover you will regard as a fragment of a larger pattern of the truth which from the separate approaches every true scholar is striving to descry.
I don't think your personal life has anything to do with your professional life. They are separate things. Whatever is happening at home shouldn't be carried to work. Everyone has his/her own journey. Some revel in the fact that they derive that from personal contentment, and others draw it from extreme sorrow.
I didn't take into account the critical tsunami that comes with having work going out. I've gone from being a complete narcissist, someone who googles my own name, to someone who has to work separately from that to avoid creative paralysis.
My writing flows out of my doctorhood. They are not separate things. They are one. I think the foremost connection between being a doctor and being a writer is the great privilege of having an intimate view of one's fellow humans, the privilege of being there and helping other people at their most vulnerable moments.