I haven’t mentioned it before, at least I don’t remember mentioning it–but in addition to nursing, I have a masters degree in creative writing. Poetry to be specific. As might be expected, my initial bachelors degree was a throw-away English degree with a minor in philosophy. And as I was graduating in exactly 4 years–a record for my friend group, who all stayed at least 5 years!– I decided the best course of action, even though I knew (I KNEW!) it would be a waste of money, was to spend two years in grad school for creative writing. I called it a vacation. Like traveling abroad before starting a real job, except I would have no real job waiting because I had trained for nothing!
But never mind the specifics, I dove headfirst into poetry because that was where my love was. It was how I processed the world, emotions and ideas. Poetry felt necessary to being alive. In those years of school, I learned more about language, and I read and wrote more than I can even imagine now. I was immersed. I was drowned but happily so in words.
And I even managed to score jobs working in teaching, writing, and editing after leaving grad school–first at the university where I had gone to school, then at a textbook publisher and then even in the exciting dot-com world and as I’ve mentioned here at prestigious tech publishers like Wired Magazine. But within a few years, it was all falling apart. September 11, 2001 destroyed not only my budding career but really drained my spirit and left me in what we’ve now come to call the quarter-life crisis.
After a few years spent blowing in the breeze, traveling the US in a Volkswagon GTI, camping for free wherever I could and couch surfing the rest of the way, I found the inspiration to go to nursing school. I’ve often felt like my life was just split in two, with a before & after nursing school– each side clearly delineated by roles and responsibilities, by the presence or lack of poetry, by my involvement in the blogging community or not.
But here I am, 16 years after deciding on my 30th birthday (which I spent camping in Death Valley, for those of you who like metaphor), and I am doing both. I am nursing full time in the ICU of a busy teaching hospital, learning every day, and I have started this blog, this little website where I can write about important issues related to nursing, health, and tell stories from nursing.
Its not so surprising then that in the last month or so, I’ve written my first poem in which I’ve ever referred to my job as a nurse. I’m going to take a chance today and share it here with you. I realize that no one really reads this site, so it doesn’t matter, but I want anyone there to know that this is important to me. These two parts of my life have needed to come together for a very long time, and here I will mark this transition. It is not exactly a celebration because this poem is not happy, because we cannot exactly say that nursing or life or 2020 is happy right now either. But no more justification. Here.
Can we pretend that this is not my eulogy?
This resume I’m writing
My curriculum vitae
Graduated summa cum honore
One more tiny Latin word better than
Your laude
And for what?
A bachelors and 2 masters
But still mostly a slave,
A nurse not much removed
From the handmaid
Apologizing for everything that’s not her fault
So what if my mother didn’t love me?
And so what if my husband left me?
Then I say out loud
“Can you help turn side to side
To get on the bedpan or should I get someone to help us?”