When driving back from class last Tuesday at about 10 pm, I felt the heavy realization of having to get up the next morning at 6:30 am (hey, to me, that is early). These past two weeks could be summed up entirely by the phrase “mentally drained” or maybe, to put it another way, “Mentally deranged.” Which was how I felt at certain points, as I sat there in lecture, listening to words like “pubic symphsis” or “occipitalmastoid suture” spill out of the professor’s mouth as easily as if she listing her weekly grocery list.
What am I doing, going back to school? Am I nuts? What if I still don’t like this career path and it will be another dead end like my master’s degree? I want to be a nurse. Or do I? Actually, I truly won’t know unless I try. I think about what it would be like to save someone’s life. To lay healing hands on someone (and also deal with their s**t). I know it is not pretty and I am working hard on making sure I do not glorify it in my head like its some job where I will breeze into the hospital and then breeze out at the end of the shift, no worse for wear. I guess part of me worries that, as much as I would like to be a nurse, I will not be able to stand up to its physical stamina requirements and pressures. Call it low self-confidence. Call it anticipatory anxiety. Call it whatever you like, but that is how I feel at times. And I especially felt those feelings acutely these past two weeks. In fact, today was the first day where I was able to get into the material and be able to tell myself, “yeah…. I can do this!” Which is what motivated me to write this post.
This whole going back to school thing is a grey, uncertain area at the moment. Some people like, and even thrive, in spontaneous situations. I tend to be more of planner. I am like the person who plans out what classes they are going to take a year in advance to see when is the earliest possible graduation. I like knowing where things are at the moment and where they are going. Uncertainty does not usually sit that well with me BUT I have been working on it and see this as an opportunity to stretch my boundaries a little. Take a ‘swim’ in that grey area and get used to the water. So I don’t know if this will work out. I would like it to, but who can say for sure? And maybe I am a little uncertain? Many things in life are not certain at all. As much as I would like to control it, I know that I can’t. And that has been one of the harder lessons I have had to learn, even to this day.
