In the past week, a table stationed in the dining hall has been filled with colored markers, baskets, and sticky notes. This is not just a new arts-and-crafts corner for those feeling artistic — it’s the first step to creating a community mural, aptly named the Healing Project.
Choate’s Medical Director, Dr. Miriam Cohen, spearheaded the movement. She was inspired by the Westminster School, which has been working on a collage of community members’ reflections on the pandemic. Mirroring them, Dr. Cohen recruited a committee of faculty members to establish The Healing Project. The project’s BoarCast announcement stated that in order to return to “a new normal,” we should reflect on all the pain and suffering the pandemic has brought about. “As a community, we need to take time to think about our lessons and our losses. Call these things out, put words and pictures to our pain, but also hopefully, find the silver linings.”
The mural consists of sticky notes with Choate community members’ thoughts and reflections on these past two years. However, the project will also add the component of a slideshow as well, for those who prefer to write things down in words, or prefer photography and other forms of art. Dr. Cohen believes that through the trauma of the pandemic, addressing, acknowledging, and reflecting on experiences is a step the community must take to heal. “Unfortunately, this virus isn’t going away, and we need to take the next steps. In order to take those next steps, we need to do some healing about what we’ve experienced,” Dr. Cohen said.
Dr. Cohen described the Healing Project as a community-oriented initiative. “Ms. Raquel Simoneau is helping a lot with the staff side because we really want everybody in our community to participate. She reached out to all the staff managers around campus to talk about how to bring the sticky notes to them and get their departments involved. Hopefully, we can get people all over campus and all different jobs to participate.”
The Choate Community’s participation is essential to the operation, contributing their “silver linings” of the pandemic. Ms. Simoneau said, “I’m a very social person, so I love being able to hang out with my friends and family, and not being able to just go over and see my niece. So when I finally got to see her for her birthday after a whole year… I burst into tears, it was crazy.”On one of his silver linings, Judah Brecher ’25 said, “The pandemic brought me closer to my siblings. The problem has always been the lack of time, and with the pandemic, there was nothing but time.”
Dr. Cohen hopes that going foward, the Healing Project will expand into the School’s programming and play a role in future student wellness. “My idea is that the sticky notes are the start of it, but it’s not the end of it. Healing doesn’t happen by writing something down on a sticky note — it’s a process, and this is a symbolic start to that process.”
