Welcome to The Quiet Part Out Loud.
A newsletter about healthcare work: the routines, the weight, the quiet heroics that never make rounds. Written from within the system, not above it. Essays on presence, burnout, and the small moments that shape our days.
Here you’ll find three ongoing threads:
Essays that dissect the unspoken contracts we sign when we show up to work, especially in healthcare. These entries explore apprenticeship, professionalism, emotional labor, power dynamics, and the quiet rebellions stitched into the seams of institutional life.
Flash fiction that leans absurd, sometimes surreal, always grounded in the texture of the everyday. Expect existential paperwork, mythological conditions with ICD codes, and bureaucrats with monocles.
Working Terms, a serialized novella-in-progress, follows Elias P. Rigg, a promising idiot navigating the mazes of hospital rounds, spectral patients, and a system that mistakes survival for success.
This is writing for readers who laugh at HR posters, who still believe in meaning but aren’t sure where to find it, and who want stories that admit: the rules aren’t neutral, the ladders are rigged, and sometimes the most honest act is to misfile on purpose.
About the Author
Aaron Boot writes at the intersection of healthcare, bureaucracy, and the quietly absurd. With a background in nurse and surgical support, he explores systems that shape (and misshape) human lives—often with a scalpel in one hand and a clipboard in the other. His work blends institutional critique, dark humor, and theoretical navel-gazing. He is currently writing Working Terms, a novella about professionalism, survival, and the art of faking it convincingly.
I write essays, fiction, and the kinds of thoughts that begin as a joke but end up sounding suspiciously like a life philosophy. I use AI the way some people use a mirror—reluctantly, and only when I need to argue with something that reflects my bad ideas back at me. Everything here is human-made, just not always on the first try.
