Meet Kim
Artist Statement
Years ago, I chose to become a family doc because I value conversation, connection, and relationship. I try to provide the best care I can to perfect strangers, who by chance alone, become my patients. As it turns out, the therapeutic relationship is not highly valued in medicine. It’s too time intensive and simply doesn’t pay the bills. That doesn’t mean that I don’t still try. But it does mean that there’s a limit to how much I feel I can meaningfully contribute to the world as a doctor.
So, I write musicals to bridge the gap. I write to share tenderness and hope and validation. I feel fortunate that I still have the desire to create and the ability to hope. At such a tender time in our world, my hope is centered in the beauty that we can share with one another through art. I believe my lived experience—the acutely intimate lens to humanity which I am privileged to have as a physician in relationship with others—is my way to use storytelling and music to open minds and hearts to our collective human struggle to be well and to be seen. I embrace a person-centered approach to the intersection of healing and art, where the best art is whatever form of art that helps a person to heal. The art and music I create for the theater is steeped in realistic human stories.
Most of my patients are navigating the gray–desperate to feel better and wanting answers that too often I don’t have for them. I think of myself as their bus monitor. They sit at the steering wheel, driving the bus, while I sit in the seat just behind or to the side of them, gently guiding, providing directions, suggestions, encouragement. The route they take declares where they are going and what they need to help them get there. I’m just along for the ride. I consider the same with my writing. I create in order to provide a potential offering to strangers who may enter into relationship with my work. I’m not in the driver’s seat of their lives, they are. But I have an offering that may help in some way–provide respite, representation, solace, compassion.
My ultimate goal is to enhance human connection with one another through art. To heal and care for others, we need medicine and art in all its forms. My art informs my work. My work informs my art. Together they create the intersectional tapestry that is my life.