Unity in Solitude is the theme for the new edition of Murmurs, the creative journal of Yale’s health profession students, which is part of the Yale School of Medicine (YSM) Program for Humanities in Medicine.
Second-year YSM students Erika Chang-Sing and Muzz Muhammad, the journal’s content editors, explain how they came up with the theme. “In 2020, we had to rethink the way we experience togetherness. We adapted to preserve the things that are precious to us: intimacy with friends and family, camaraderie in the classroom, and solidarity in rejecting profoundly unjust systems of power. These things look different now because we were called to come together to achieve a common goal by staying apart from each other. There’s an inherent tension between this dual demand of unity and isolation. In making this edition, we wanted to capture this tension of Unity in Solitude and the resilience, creativity, and beauty that it has borne.” Students Chang Su, Luiza Dale, and Tuan Quoc Pham were part of the Editorial and Design team with Chang-Sing and Muhammad.
Below is the introduction to the Unity in Solitude edition. To receive a pdf of the digital edition of Murmurs, please email muzzammil.muhammad@yale.edu.
It is our goal to capture this – our resilience, our love and our endless capacity for joy – through this, our celebration of Unity in Solitude. We hope to do justice to these treasures
Murmurs introduction
“In sheer absurdity, heartbreak and human calamity, 2020 was a year that feels to have surpassed all others. For many of us, it was a year spent in fear that a cartoonishly disturbing political climate might disrupt and upend the shape of our lives. For more still, it was a year of painful retraumatization. We watched and experienced agents of privilege unleashing brutal violence on people and communities they deemed deserving of such treatment. For all of us, it was a year of loss: of loved ones, of time, and of togetherness, to a foe unseen with a destructive capacity that humbled even those parts of the world that we thought were the most prepared. What is more, we were called upon to experience these things alone.
Through all of this, though, we have lived. We planned, rescheduled and finally made it onto the Zoom call with the friends we hadn’t seen since high school graduation. We went on a hike, and found a new trail we really like, that’s lined on both sides with trees and ends in a little stream. We discovered the cozy joys of sourdough bread, plant propagation, and whipped coffee. Dogs and cats everywhere rejoiced. We listened to every song on our daily Spotify playlists and found a ton of new songs to dance to in the living room. We didn’t go home for Christmas, but the family groupchat was lit on the 25th. We took all of this home and wrote, drew, sang and painted about it. It is our goal to capture this – our resilience, our love and our endless capacity for joy – through this, our celebration of Unity in Solitude. We hope to do justice to these treasures.”