10 - Uncertainty in Medicine: Trusting the Process with Leila Simon Hayes
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is The Nocturnists, Uncertainty in Medicine. I'm Emily Silverman. And today, we're stepping inside the studio of Leela Simon Hayes. Leela is a visual artist and award-winning designer in Boston. Her work explores color, shape, and movement and takes the form of rich bold patterns printed on textiles, wallpapers, homewares, book covers, and other household objects. Central to Leela's process is that she starts all her work without a plan.
I mean most of what I'm making comes from a practice of worshipping imperfectionism. And Really letting things unfold as they unfold. starting with shapes, usually from black ink. I use a lot of Sumi ink. I fell in love. It's just the most opaque, smooth, delicious substance to paint with.
Today we jump into Leela's world to learn more about what her artistic process, dedicated to the inevitability of spontaneous beauty, can teach us about navigating uncertainty in medicine. Because for Leela, when she's in the studio, it's about making work, but it's also about cultivating the skills of sitting with uncertainty and trusting her gut. Both skills that she's relied on to navigate her own journey of diagnostic uncertainty and physical pain. Since she was a teen, Leela's been dealing with food sensitivities that severely impact her health, most notably an extreme reaction to sugar, which, when she was 19, doctors told her wasn't real. By the time she was in her 20s, chronic pain was constant, along with inexplicable injuries.
Still, she encountered resistance in the healthcare system, false certainty, or even outright. but disbelief when she tried to seek help.
I got the sense that I was annoying to doctors and that they very easily put me in a diagnosis that feels like This is not very nice, but kind of like A dumpster where people who have challenging diagnoses get dumped when doctors don't know.
Leela's pain felt mysterious, ever-changing, and impossible to describe in the short bursts of time allotted in medical appointments.
Never was a diagnosis that resonated with me.
What is Leila Simon Hayes’s artistic process and why does she start without a plan?
It was basically just acknowledging that I have chronic pain and that it has mysterious elements and onsets and responses, but I I felt kind of dismissed. And so I kind of backed away from doctors for many, many years and decided that talking about my health was not great for my health.
And so I
just really paused.
Leela found ways to prevent and manage her own pain best she could as her career as a designer took off. The work drew on her love of drawing, painting and collage, all things that she'd done and loved since she was a kid. But as her life filled up with work and with raising young kids, she started to feel like something was missing.
You know, I've always been an artist, but when I was 41, I had just left a job that was really unsatisfying. And leaving that job made me feel the absence of my own art making more intensely than I really ever had.
Leela said the pull back to a personal creative practice, one that came from her own impulses and not from her job, felt impossible to ignore.
It's as if it was asking something of me. and asking me to get out of the way.
So she went back to working freelance and shortly thereafter came across an idea on Instagram called the 100 Days Project. Basically, come up with a prompt to make something every day for a hundred days. The prompt should be so simple that you can't not do it every day.
I wrote this whole long list great ideas. Ah, there must have been like seventy-five different ideas. But they were all a little complicated. And I wasn't sure that I could show up for them for a hundred days. And at the very bottom, I don't know when I added it, but it's in a different pen, it's in horrible handwriting. It was just like
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:18
2
What is Leila Simon Hayes’s artistic process and why does she start without a plan?
3:18–7:02
3
How did chronic pain and medical dismissal shape Leila’s relationship with uncertainty?
7:02–11:01
4
What is the 100‑Days Project and how did it help Leila trust her intuition?
11:01–15:56
5
How did the 100‑Day pattern experiment lead to a breakthrough in Leila’s work?
15:56–20:14
6
What does Leila’s studio look like and how does it embody uncertainty?
20:14–21:00