Creative Writing Awards 2024: “Thoughts on Pushing Through” by Brielle Quarles

The 21st annual Creative Writing Awards (cwa) were held on April 24, 2024, a celebration of the liberal arts deeply embedded in the science and clinical practice of the Yale Cchool of Nursing (YSN) community. After a keynote speech by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Pam Belluck, each of the three winners read their work aloud. Three honorable mentions were also saluted.

Thoughts on Pushing Through

by Brielle Quarles ‘25 MSN

After welcoming a child into the world for the first time–at 6:57am–I have a greater appreciation for myself.

The baby delivered herself into my palms. I only held her for a second, trying to take in everything so I can remember forever. The joy the sweat the tears the labor the love that brought this baby to earth.

I hold onto this moment of joy hoping that it lasts long enough for me to come back next week.

Just a few hours earlier I see the midwife yelling at a Black woman to

PUSH!

Her legs bent back, forced open by two white nurses on either side

They also yell

PUSH!

She is crying with each PUSH

I am immobilized with anger and horror, only able to move when I hear the pager beep, calling me to a different room

Someone else is in labor

I hold the scene in my mind,

I am instructed to PUSH through

I have repeatedly been told that as I gain experience, my ability to PUSH through

my emotions–as one preceptor, ironically, a psychiatric nurse phrased it “to compartmentalize”–will improve

After years of denying myself the privilege—and it is indeed a privilege—to experience the full range of emotions that brew internally, I struggle to make sense of this. How do I PUSH through?

How do I PUSH aside my grief?

I carry centuries of grief within me

My grief is my own, but it also belongs to my mother and aunt and grandmother and great-grandmother and great-great grandmother and sisters I have never met.

My grief is mine and I wear it proudly. I wear it for my ancestors who never got to wear it for themselves.

It lives inside and all around me.

I am my grief.

I am my grandmother. Memphis, Tennessee 1968. Crouched over in pain, limping toward the Negro Entrance of Baptist Memorial Hospital. She pushes through.

I am her.

I am always her.

When I leave at 7:30 and change out of my scrubs, they will see me as her.

I know exactly what it means to PUSH. Be PUSHED aside. To ask me to PUSH through it, is to ask me to set aside myself.

to take my grief and my joy and the essence of myself and push it to a place I cannot reach it. What if I never reach it again?

I am not interested in pushing through or pushing upward to break the glass ceiling.

I want us all to see the sky with the naked eye.   

Read More CWA 2024 Winners