We recently connected with Tyler Beauchamp and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Tyler, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?
Through trial and error, emphasis on the error. I think most things worthwhile in life are found through failure. How do you know what you really want if you don’t challenge yourself and lose? If after losing, you find yourself working to get it back, it’s probably part of your purpose. I don’t think I grew up with a purpose. I didn’t know as a kid I wanted to be a doctor or an author. I tried everything I loved and failed a ton along the way, but the struggles I faced on the paths to medicine and writing were never enough to make me question my love for either pursuit. To me, purpose is loving the process of a journey and not letting setbacks define where that journey ends.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
When I grew up, I remember loving writing, and I remember having chronic pain. I never thought that my life would end up revolving around the two. Years later, I’ve written my first book, and I’m soon to graduate from medical school.
I grew up writing home movie scripts and short stories, and I finished a rough book outline as a junior, but I didn’t show a soul. Writing was an escape, and I was terrified to bring others in. What if they found the whole thing laughable? To be fair, they probably would have. The story was pretty terrible, but you’ve got to start somewhere, right?
At the same time, I was a patient jumping around research clinics for the better part of my childhood, which gave me great exposure to one side of the medical curtain. I started college, still looking for a diagnosis and still silently writing. I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I tried everything (creative writing, business, psychology, athletic training, and more) because I didn’t want to leave wondering, “What if?” It wasn’t until I worked with physicians and saw the other side of the curtain that I found my place. Medicine would allow me to work hands-on with people through their most difficult days and create a lasting impact in their lives. I could also bring my experience as a long-time patient to help empathize with patients and their struggles.
During medical school, in the height of the pandemic, I finally found a story I felt was worth sharing. Kids and young adults were plagued with depression, anxiety, and self-harm…and they were completely isolated during the peak time of their lives requiring social support. My time running a Free Mental Health Clinic, my work in Pediatrics, and a dash of personal battles helped shape the boy’s story. Life in the pandemic was synonymous with isolation. We can’t go through life alone, yet the pandemic did everything in its power to make us all believe we had to. I wanted to translate that to a vulnerable high school student overcoming trauma while highlighting key issues of youth mental illness today (social media, peer pressures, anxiety/depression). In my opinion, children are the most vulnerable members of our society, and they’re surrounded by pressures very few of us can even fathom. Freeze Frame was made to highlight how everyone uniquely lives out their own trauma and to encourage us all to ask for help when we need it.
I was beyond blessed to have the book find an audience, connect me with readers across the country, and even spark the development of a television adaptation! Currently, I am graduating from medical school to begin training in pediatrics (fingers crossed!). I’ve also just finished my next book’s first draft, and hopefully will be able to land a literary agent soon! For the future, I hope to become a pediatrician who writes stories for my patients, combining art and medicine to support their health and hearts.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. Run towards passion, not away from hatred: This isn’t just a lesson for grand-scale life decisions. This applies to the most mundane aspects of your day-to-day life. If you’re at work and your team is burdened with a monotonous task, inject passion and heart into your approach or even into the conversations around the task. Choose to bring light to everything you do. You can’t always choose the moments life hands you, but you can certainly choose how you respond to them. For those larger decisions (career, love, purpose), don’t make decisions based on not doing what you know you dislike. Make the decisions focused on doing what you love and what excites you. That’s how you build a mindset to fight past inevitable roadblocks and cultivate the life you want after you come out the other side.
2. Embrace rejection: This ties back to the first question you asked, but I really believe failure is one of the most invaluable tools to any pursuit or dream. It’s where you learn who you are and how you can improve. Try your best to reframe failing as a positive because it is. Just strip away all the negative perceptions others place on failure or how others may inaccurately measure one’s worth by it, and focus on why you failed. What went wrong? What can you do between now and the next time you try to help yourself succeed? If I’m ever in a place in my life where I don’t think it’s possible to fail, I’m either not growing as a person, or I’m not being honest with myself.
3. Never lose sight of your cornerstone: When you’re working for years towards a dream, it’s so easy to let tiny compromises build upon each other to the point where you forget why you had the dream in the first place. It’s easy for medical trainees to become burdened by hours, exposure to horrors, and excessive pressures. That’s what burnout is built on. It’s easy for creatives to stay in their own heads, not be present around others, and selfishly put their dreams above the needs of friends or family. Whatever your dream may be, if you lose yourself in the process, it’s not worth it. Nothing is worth losing friendships, family, or love. Remind yourself daily why you’re working so hard on your given dream and what kind of person you need to be once you get there. If you cannot find joy and peace in the process leading to your dream, refocus and protect the things that help make that happen.
All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?
I’d say my future is full of unknowns at the moment. Apart from matching (being selected for residency, which at this point, I’ve done all I can do to help make happen!), my biggest obstacle is landing a literary agent. It’s an incredibly challenging process, and it can take years to decades to happen if it ever does. I plan to keep writing, continue learning from those in the industry on how best to navigate it, and above all not let rejection letters keep me from making the dream come true. But, if anyone knows a literary agent who might be interested in an atypical author in Children’s and YA literature, tell them to say hi!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.tyler-beauchamp.com
- Instagram: @_tylerbeauchamp
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tyler.beauchamp1/
- Twitter: @_tylerbeauchamp
