Discovery

"The moment I could see it, yes, yes, I can see it now."
- Taylor Swift, Mine

I had a pivotal moment tonight at work. I can only compare it to the scene from the first season in Friends (which I suspect is the end of the episode The One With Two Parts: Part 2 but I can't confirm this right now) when Ross comes to truly understand that he is going to be a father. He mentions earlier in the episode that he knows he is "having a baby" but that he hasn't thought about "being a dad", and he later has a talk with his father where his dad shares that he didn't feel like a father until the first time baby Ross grabbed his finger with his whole tiny hand. Finally, at the end of the episode, Ross' monkey Marcel is in the hospital, in recovery after choking on some scrabble tiles. Marcel grabs one of Ross' fingers, and the look on Ross' face (though he never articulates the feeling) shows that he is, at that moment, ready to be a father.

My moment was not about parenthood. It was about my choice of career.

One of my coworkers is a young, immature girl. I often feel protective of her, like when she admitted that she was using no form of birth control other than "pulling out", or when she passively mentions something that makes her boyfriend sound like Acadia. I was disappointed when she dropped out of the eleventh grade in the spring and jubilant when I found out that she decided to go back this fall. I'm sharing all of this now because I want you to know a bit about her, but I don't intend to give her a nickname, because I'll probably never mention her again.

At the end of our shift tonight, she came running to me from the back of the store. She told me that she had just pinched her finger in our (dirty, old, dangerous looking) ladder and that she didn't know what to do. She was coming to me for help - not the other supervisor, not our boss. She wanted my help. I helped her clean and bandage the cut. I got her to put a glove on so that she could keep helping us clean without risking getting dirty water or cleaning products on the band-aid. And (in a clever moment of which I'm rather proud) I wet some paper towel, molded it to her finger, and put it in the freezer because we don't have an ice pack but we wanted to counter the inevitable swelling.

Her injury was neither gory nor disturbing. The cut was long but shallow, so the bleeding was minimal, and the bruising obviously wouldn't start in earnest for some time. So the fact that I was very calm while I helped her was no surprise to me at all. What did come as a pleasant surprise where all the other feelings I experienced. I felt competent, professional, and confident. It felt like all of my gut instincts (because I have to admit I remember nothing from the First Aid courses I've taken) were the perfect actions to be taking, given the circumstances and the supplies at hand. Everything felt so natural and right. Like I was truly doing what I was supposed to be doing. And I don't just mean what I was supposed to be doing in that moment. I mean what I'm supposed to do, for years.

I just feel it. I truly and fully want to be a nurse. It's what I'm meant to do. It's going to take me a while yet to get there - honestly, I've fucked up, there is no way I'll finish my correspondence courses before I leave, so I will have to finish them in the summer and inevitably be waitlisted in the nursing program until the fall of 2013 - but I'm going to get there. I know I've had doubts recently, but I doubt everything I do. I think my recent feelings have been more about things being wrong inside my head than things being wrong with the decisions I've made. And although that doesn't fix the way I feel, not really, it does take away some of the hopelessness in which I've been wallowing lately. And that's as good a step as any.