My hand ached, again, from the familiar cursive loop of my own name on the new patient form. The pen, predictably, was a cheap one, almost out of ink, skipping across the too-thin paper, just like the 23 other pens before it. This was, by my unofficial count, the 13th time I’d performed this exact ritual in 23 years of adult life, moving from city to city, state to state. Each move, each new job, each shift in insurance or just a simple desire for a fresh perspective, inevitably landed me back here, at the clipboard, confronting the same blank spaces. Do I drink? Do I smoke? Any serious illnesses? And then, the true emotional gauntlet: “Please describe your current symptoms or concerns.”
It feels transactional, clinical, cold. Yet, what we’re being asked to do is anything but. We’re being asked to condense years of personal health narrative, a deeply intricate story of our bodies and anxieties, into a few bullet points. It’s not just a logistical hurdle, a chore to tick off a list. We are performing emotional labor, constructing a new relationship of trust from scratch, all while sitting in a waiting room that smells faintly of disinfectant and the collective anxiety of 3 other people. We rarely acknowledge this, do we? This constant re-enactment of vulnerability, the expectation that we’ll just “get over it” and move on to the next set of forms.
I once joked
