i thought i would heal my worthiness wound and become a nurse

instead i healed my nurse wound and found myself worthy

this is a two-parter. i wanted to integrate the two parts into one seamless piece but i’ve been in a pain flare and my brain is mush and my eyes are unable to focus and yesterday was the eclipse and we’re still in mercury retrograde, so here it is 😅

also…my thoughts on nursing are my own, based on my own personal experiences and observations. the world is big and lived experiences vary, if this doesn’t resonate with you that’s okay <3

i could have gone back to work part-time but i didn’t. i wish i could say it was because i valued my serenity and understood that parenting a small child is a(n under appreciated) full time job – but these are lessons i’m still learning. i didn’t go back because i was angry. i gave so much to my work. too much.

effort. emotional labour. monetary contributions. overtime.

and then i got pregnant and had really painful SI joint issues (which i now understand to be part of my chronic illness). i had to take a lot of time off because i could barely walk. when i did go to work, i moved really slow and had to say no a lot.

about six and-a-half months into my pregnancy, one of the practitioners i was working with told me that every time i went to work, i was just undoing all of my therapy and i wasn’t going to get better that way.

so i went ‘off sick’, i learned to manage the pain, i started to be able to move again… and then my son was born… and then my brother died. and i can count on one hand the number of people from my work who reached out. through all of it.

being on the receiving end of such deafening silence shattered my illusion of belonging. i realized that once i could no longer give 110 percent, or work hard to make other people’s lives easier, i no longer mattered at all. i have the urge to say the common expression, out of sight, out of mind, but the reality is that when i was still working – at a lower capacity – i was already a social pariah, it just hadn’t hit me yet.

i was so bitter. and i held onto that resentment until recently. what helped me finally heal was realizing that i put myself in that dynamic. it wasn’t something that happened to me, without my consent. it was a relationship that i engaged in – however consciously or unconsciously. from a place of needing to be needed. and in lieu of being fairly compensated for my labour, i accepted bragging (complaining) rights about giving to depletion instead. i accepted praise for ‘going above and beyond’ as belonging. but real belonging isn’t conditional.

and i think where i’ve landed is that in a system where essentially everyone is overworked and underpaid (except for the doctors, maybe, but we can talk about hierarchy in another conversation), belonging is always going to be conditional. it’s always going to be what can you do for me and never what do you need? always going to look like, i appreciate you if you can lighten my burden and rarely, you belong. period.

***

part 2

i was a psw (cna) for twelve years. and then i experienced marrow-deep loss and spent the next three years on a journey home to myself. i knew this couldn’t be it. there had to be more to this precious life than what i was experiencing.

during that reflective time, i often expected to end up back in healthcare as a more evolved version of myself — i’ve grapple a lot with the ways i could have shown up more compassionately had i been a little more self-aware, tuned in to our interconnectedness and holding boundaries that stood between me and burnout.

journal excerpt, march 21, 2025

i feel like the main things that stopped me from continuing my education into nursing (though i started once and quickly stopped) were responsibility and money. the nurses i worked with didn’t make that much more than me and they had way more responsibility. also, if i fucked up as a psw, it was on someone else’s license…and there felt like a kind of safety in that.

and to be honest, a lot of the nurses i worked with were miserable. i don’t blame them. they were overworked and underpaid — and as much as i’m sure they each started out as starry-eyed about the work as i did, burnout and moral injury have their way with you in our current medical system.

journal excerpt, march 30, 2025

i did a lot of belief work this eclipse season. getting to the heart of the things inside me that make me feel trapped, that make the life i want feel like it’s oceans away. i identified limiting beliefs around responsibility and success and a whole-ass block around seeking approval vs. trusting myself. and maybe it sounds dramatic but the work i did changed me. this eclipse season changed me.

and part of me thought that once i tackled these beliefs i would find myself down the nursing path once more. thought that the thing keeping me from this path was my fear of responsibility. but i learned that couldn’t be further from the truth.

i came across the book: witches, midwives and nurses (which i want to read but haven’t, so i actually have no idea if it lines up with my thesis here 😅). and it dawned on me that i no longer want to be a nurse – at least not in the oppressive, patriarchal paradigm that is currently in place.

to want to be a nurse in this paradigm is to want to give to depletion (or to be forever fighting against that expectation), to receive self-worth through external validation that you may or may not ever get, to medicate people who are sick without helping them learn to be well, to do backbreaking physical and emotional labour without adequate compensation (and to, on some level, derive value from this relationship) and to put your needs last (or, ideally, not have any).

journal excerpt, march 21, 2025

and… that’s just not where i’m at anymore.

i’m reflecting on what’s changed for me consciously and unconsciously. i think some beliefs that have slowly shifted for me without a lot of intentional effort (or maybe a lot of intentional effort from the universe and people around me that i just got to, sort of, soak in) are that i don’t need to kill myself to belong, i don’t need to twist myself into unrecognizable shapes to be worthy of doing the work, it doesn’t need to be that hard all the time and my labour (especially emotional labour) deserves adequate compensation.

and if i think about the part i consciously played in arriving here - it has to be that over the last year and a half i realized that the real goal (for me) is community. in the times we’re in collectively and the time i’m in personally, it’s never been more abundantly clear to me that this has to be the goal. and community should never look like killing yourself to belong. community, by definition, is reciprocal in nature. it ebbs and flows. it respects boundaries. it respects differences. it includes. it understands people show up as their imperfect selves, that there will be sticky spots – but also always a path forward. at least this is the community i’m daydreaming about.

and that type of community doesn’t ask me to give until there’s nothing left, that kind of community asks me to give what i can and it also asks what i need. and when that’s the goal – the pressure to be all things to all people is off.

the pressure to show up, however, is on. but that’s sort of the beautiful thing about this shift for me. aspiring nurse krystal (and aspiring social worker krystal and mental health volunteer krystal) needed to be needed. and that was fucking exhausting…and made me bitter. witchy death midwife krystal needs to be in community which requires me to show up (if you want to be in community, you need to be community – i say to myself in the bathroom mirror). and once i’ve done that, that’s it, i’ve done the thing. i don’t have to say the perfect, right thing; i don’t have to try not to be weird; i don’t have to make sure all your needs are met. i just have to show up. and the thing is – that’s entirely within my control. it doesn’t depend on any external validation. i don’t need to do metaphorical gymnastics to seek approval. i can show up and you can not like how i showed up. but i still showed up. and that’s success.

i dunno, i feel like i unlocked the secret here (lol)...if you decide for yourself what success is, it doesn’t have to be that hard. it sounds super simple. and it is. but, geeeeeez, did i have a lot of unlearning to do to get here.

some belief work i did this eclipse season, inspired by this podcast with Narinder Bazen and Dajé Alōh:

music i’m loving: