With Dr. Chika Stacy Oriuwa, author of her 2024 memoir, Unlike The Rest: A Doctor’s Story. Dr. Oriuwa is a graduate of the University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine, where she was named the valedictorian of her graduating medical class in 2020. She is a physician, professional spoken word poet, international public speaker, writer, and champion of authentic leadership through genuine human connections. Presently, Dr. Oriuwa is completing her residency in psychiatry at the University of Toronto where she aims to go on to complete further sub-specialist training in forensic neuro-psychiatry. Dr. Oriuwa has served on a variety boards, using her expertise to influence their efforts in creating equal opportunity and curating spaces of wellness and artistic expression. She is a recipient of numerous prestigious awards and honors, including being recognized as one of Best Health Magazine’s ‘2020 Women of the Year’ and TIME Magazine’s Next Generation Leaders. Additionally, Dr. Oriuwa was recently honored in Mattel’s #ThankYouHeroes campaign alongside five other women with a one-of-kind Barbie doll made in her image to commemorate her contributions as a frontline healthcare worker.

Transcript

00:00:01 Andrea

Hello and welcome to Alright, Now What? I’m your host, Andrea Gunraj from the Canadian Women’s Foundation.

Gender equality and justice where we live, work, learn, and play is the goal. And it makes life better for everyone. This podcast is our chance to connect with insightful people and explore what it’ll take to get there in Canada.

The work of the Canadian Women’s Foundation and our partners takes place on traditional First Nations, Métis, and Inuit territories. We are grateful for the opportunity to meet and work on this land. However, we recognize that land acknowledgments are not enough. We need to pursue truth, reconciliation, decolonization, and allyship in an ongoing effort to make right with all our relations.

00:00:47 Andrea

In this episode, I’m interviewing Dr. Chika Stacy Oriuwa, author of her 2024 memoir ‘Unlike the Rest: A Doctor’s Story.’

Dr. Oriuwa is a graduate from the University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine, where she was named Valedictorian in 2020. She is a physician, professional spoken word poet, international public speaker, writer, and champion of authentic leadership through genuine human connections. She’s completing her residency in psychiatry at the University of Toronto, where she aims to go on to sub-specialist training in forensic neuro-psychiatry.

Dr. Oriuwa has served on many boards, building equal opportunity and curating spaces of wellness and artistic expression. She is a recipient of many prestigious awards and honors, chosen as one of Best Health Magazine’s 2020 Women of the Year and TIME Magazine’s Next Generation Leaders. She was honored in Mattel’s #ThankYouHeroes campaign alongside five other women with a one-of-kind Barbie doll made in her image to commemorate her contributions as a frontline healthcare worker.

I start by asking Dr. Oriuwa to do the “gender equality changemaker quiz” we launched earlier this year as a part of our new Count Me In initiative for a gender equal Canada. Please check it out yourself at yescountmein.ca.

00:02:11 Chika Stacy

A) I want to start off by saying that I absolutely loved the questions and for so many of—so many of the answers I was like, oh, I could see myself doing a little bit of each of these things. Where is the “all the above”? That was the one resounding thought that I had felt, because I really do view myself as a shape shifter, like I am able to become whatever the situation almost needs. But I really did appreciate being challenged with having to choose one specific kind of thing.

And, you know, the foremost bucket that I fell under was the Creator, which honestly wasn’t very surprising to me, as someone who has been writing their entire life. I started to write thoughts out of my brain and onto the paper when I was 5-6 years old, only a few years actually realizing that what I was writing was poetry, but at the time I was just writing what I felt in my heart.

Then spending the rest of my life using the power of words to not only heal myself but also restore others. That force of creative nature that was within me has always been the guiding light of the work that I do. And so, it’s entirely unsurprising to me that Creator was the biggest category that I fell under.

The next after that was Collaborator, which again is not surprising. I think that bit of itself, that bit of my personality, lends itself well to my career in medicine, which has to be very collaborative—especially in psychiatry, we need to work in an interdisciplinary fashion.

And then I was a Challenger. That was the third one. And I think that, again speaking to my other hat as an Advocate, my other hat as someone who is very vocal, and I’m a public speaker and a lot of my poetry also challenges the way that we view the world. And so, I just think that, once again, makes sense.

And then the last one was a Connector, which I am a little bit surprised by. But I guess, like, these things have to be split up in some way. I do love connecting with other people. And ironically, my keynote that I’m now launching this fall is all about human connection. And so, I do find connecting to be really fascinating, but I guess the other elements just won out.

00:04:31 Andrea

When people want you to talk, they want you to talk about, you know, what it’s like to be a doctor, a Black woman in medicine, what your experiences were, what was it like to have a Barbie made after you?

But I actually want to hone in on your writing because your writing is so, so important to your heart, so important to your journey, to your life as a kid, that’s how you saw yourself.

I’d like you to tell us a bit about your writing journey and what the idea of just telling your story means to you today.

00:05:07 Chika Stacy

I’m honestly over the moon by this question because writing to me is as natural as breathing.

And as a child, I remember some of my earliest memories of my life are me sitting with my journal and just writing whatever came into my heart. And I often view writing, and specifically writing poetry, almost as something that happens to me, because throughout my life I will often times, like, wake up or just feel like I have this strike of genius and just have this stanza in my head that I have to get out and I don’t even exactly know where it originated from, and it almost feels like I’m a creative vessel or a creative channel and that these experiences just kind of happened to me and then I just create this poetry and I stand back and it almost doesn’t make sense how it’s, like—how I string these things together.

But that to me is just the most natural thing that my mind and my body does. And so, I’m—I feel like I’ve been incredibly blessed with this creative gift to write.

And some of the earliest experiences for me when I really recognize that my words were transcendent was when I wrote a poem for my mother in the weeks after my maternal grandmother’s death, when my mother was just enveloped by grief. And I wrote her this poem from the perspective of my grandmother in heaven, looking down on my mom and telling her that it was going to be OK and that she was always going to watch over her and it was the first time in weeks that I saw my mother smile.

And then that for me planted the seed within myself that, although I had this childhood aspiration to pursue medicine, that medicine wasn’t the only way to heal. And that was reaffirmed to me when I was 12 years old, and it was the first time that I performed my poetry in a public forum. It was at a school assembly for Remembrance Day, and there was a veteran in the crowd, and by the end of it he stood up and he was crying. And applauding. And that for me once again reaffirmed the transcendent power of words.

And so, to then spend the rest of my life, kind of, carrying this balance between my love of creative expression and writing and poetry, and my love for science and biology and all things medicine. Then to finally have this opportunity to write this book. It just feels like this beautiful combination of a lifetime of effort and admiration and just true love of words—and medicine.

00:07:51 Andrea

I’d love to ask you about your deepest learning. You know, you got a chance to reflect and put it down on paper and think it through.

What core life lesson in this project of building gender equality and, you know, intersectional gender equalities, all the things, all the joy and the freedoms and the rights and the support and the power that we need.

I’d love you to share that with us and tell us a bit about what was the thing that it all distilled to that we can take from this and learn from.

00:08:24 Chika Stacy

So, I also really love this question and I love that we are meeting today because it was just this morning that I finished writing a new poem, and it’s called ‘Love Letters from My Body,’ and it’s actually based on what I learned about myself from this book.

So, within my book, ‘Unlike the Rest: A Doctor’s Story,’ which is ostensibly about my journey through medicine, one can see and glean that I really struggled with disordered eating throughout my entire life. And that really peaked for me in different chapters of my life, primarily immediately before applying into medical school and again in medical school. And this really turbulent chaotic relationship that I had with my body and what it took for me to really struggle with that throughout medical school and then in residency when I became pregnant with my son and then quickly thereafter my daughter.

Being on this healing journey and really coming to radically accept my body as a woman and also my story, and not to be ashamed of this story, which is the one story that, despite all of the stages that I have been on, all the interviews I have done, all of the articles I have written, I’ve never talked about my eating disorder. And I didn’t do it because I was so ashamed of it.

And so, to be able to put it into writing, the one thing that I learned about myself is that a) I don’t need to be ashamed of my story because often when we think of someone with an eating disorder, we don’t think of, you know, a late 20s Black woman. We think of—usually the archetype is a teenage, a white teenage girl, right? That’s the average patient that we think about.

And so, what it took for me to reconcile that cognitive dissonance and then realize more than anything that I am a human in evolution. That my story, my journey of healing, is not always going to look linear, and it’s not ever going to be finished.

And that is OK for me to accept that I am in this evolution, and it is OK to also look back in reflection and to just be so damn proud of how far I have come. What it took for me to read, to recite that poem to my mom this morning who, for years, I couldn’t even—she couldn’t digest that conversation—no pun intended—but she really couldn’t.

So, to be able to sit across from her and read and recite and perform that poem for her, just, it signaled to me that I had reached a real point of understanding with my body.

00:11:12 Andrea

You know, I’m going to ask you about your passion: the top gender equality issue you’re most passionate about and why it’s important.

But it’s not one issue that you’re thinking is important here. You want to look at it from lots of different perspectives, and that’s what I’m getting from you.

Share with us the things that you’re passionate about, plural, and where your head is at right now, given all the things that you’ve experienced, the way that you’ve written it down, processed it, shared it so far, and we’re going to take it from here.

00:11:41 Chika Stacy

When it comes to this topic of women’s issues that I’m passionate about, it is so multifaceted.

I’ve alluded to the idea of women’s mental health, especially as it pertains to the intersectionality of bringing light to and speaking truth to the experiences of women and how it is that we engage with our body, how it is that we radically accept our body.

Particularly for me, especially in the last few years, perinatal mental health is just an explosive topic that I have just—have so much more profound appreciation for, having had two children in two years and recognizing that, my goodness, there is a dearth of mental health that needs to be addressed amongst women who are going through this, especially mothers who return to work outside of the home, because there’s always work inside the home, which should not be ignored and should be valued. But returning to work outside of the home and how it is that society still has not got it right. We still have not found ways to allow a mother to be a mother but also be a woman out in the world, contributing to society, being entrepreneurial, being career driven. We still have not gotten it right.

That has been very much declared for me in the last three years as I struggle to balance these things in a very fine way.

And then, of course, as it pertains once again to Black women’s maternal health and how it is that Black women are still—giving birth is one of the riskiest thing a Black woman can do. And that discussion still very much needs to be had. And so, these things I’m so incredibly passionate about.

It’s almost October—Breast Cancer Awareness Month is something that I’m really passionate about as well. I write about in my book, ‘Unlike the Rest,’ that my mother struggled with DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ), which is like stage 0 breast cancer, like right before it’s cancerous. But she had to go through the mastectomy and the radiation and what it was like for me as a 10-year-old girl to look up to this woman who was and still is my superhero and see her in that very fragile and vulnerable state and not really know how to make sense of it.

The story of breast cancer and how it impacts Black women differently and disproportionately, and having a higher, higher cases of mortality for younger Black women—like there’s just so many conversations that need to be unpacked there.

And so, I mean, I could go on for another ten more minutes about all the topics of women’s health that I’m passionate about, but those are definitely amongst the top.

00:14:24 Andrea

What’s one thing that we can do to start closing this gap? Especially the intersectionality gaps where we’re just not recognizing there’s a history as to why we’re not recognizing women’s health, certainly not racialized women’s health, certainly not younger, racialized women’s health in that way, and you’re an insider in medicine, and then you’re also one step outsider as well, too.

How can we close this gap?

00:14:52 Chika Stacy

I believe that the first step is being able to have honest and vulnerable conversations. Not just about where we are right now, which is so incredibly important, but where we’ve been, because if we don’t understand the elements that have created that history, we are destined to repeat it.

Truly having an understanding of how it is that these inequities arose will allow us to be able to move forward collectively and more strongly.

And so, I think that’s only possible by ensuring that all voices are given an opportunity to be heard, and that’s why I’m so—or I feel so incredibly honored to be able to sit on the board of this incredible charity called Unsinkable, which is a charity that talks about narrative medicine and talking about mental health through storytelling.

And I think that the power of a single story cannot be overestimated. There’s so much that individuals can glean from, especially within a clinical capacity, from hearing about the stories, whether that’s told in a creative or poetic way or artistic way, where it can resonate in a different way with the recipient, that other forms of communication cannot do.

And so, I just think that that kind of storytelling needs to be so protected. And I also think it needs to be uplifted, especially in more conservative spaces like medicine.

00:16:20 Andrea

I hear people saying, “protect women. Protect trans folks. Protect people who are marginalized.”

I think “protect and honor our stories” is the way that you do so much of that protecting and bringing things to a better place.

One powerful take away as we close. Give our listeners something that can help us be better gender equality changemakers, no matter who we are.

00:16:49 Chika Stacy

Give women every single opportunity to shine.

I feel like the world, oftentimes, they’re afraid of a woman who is completely and fully empowered. You know? Especially if that woman is a woman of colour or a woman of a different intersectionality.

But I believe that when we allow women to be fully empowered, the world will ultimately be changed for the better.

I really do hope that when someone reads this book, they will recognize that it is not only to empower yourself, it’s important to not only empower yourself, but also strive to empower every single woman in your life, especially the women who are juggling a million different roles. And I think that ultimately the world would be a better place afterwards.

00:17:43 Andrea

Alright, Now What?

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