I sat near the aisle, next to my mother, who was next to my stepfather. It wasn’t at all how I had pictured graduation from my emergency medicine residency at Mercy Hospital in the South Bronx would be, but it certainly was a blistering end. The following excerpt was taken from the book, The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir by Michele Harper. In this hopeful, moving, and beautiful book, she passes along the precious, necessary lessons that she has learned as a daughter, a woman, and a physician. As she shines a light on the systemic disenfranchisement of the patients she treats as they struggle to maintain their health and dignity, Harper comes to understand the importance of allowing ourselves to make peace with the past as we draw support from the present.

How to understand that compassion isn’t the same as justice. How to tell the truth when it’s simpler to overlook it. How to let go of fear even when the future is murky. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery. The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper’s journey toward self-healing. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process. In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken–physically, emotionally, psychically. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn’t move with her. Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. After taking her first breath in NYC, she was brought up in Washington, D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. An emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself.

The beauty in breaking