Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

This weekend, in an effort to get some peace of mind, I have come home to my parents' house. It's a mini-vacation of sorts, though I do miss my girls. I had a terrible week, and it was filled with terrible experiences which I did not enjoy at all. In light of that, I needed to get away. Funnily enough, though, is that five minutes into being here, my mother was already saying nasty things to me. Amazing! I thought she might've missed me, but, alas, no. Even that, though, is better than the experiment in terror that was my entire week.

For example, my meeting with my advisor. I don't want to rehash the whole thing, but the long-story-short version of it is that they wanted to switch me to an American Sign Language class rather than my nutritional chemistry class because I had already taken nutrition at Owens. The problem is that the ASL class is only one credit hour--which just barely keeps me a full time student--and it's already two weeks in. I always promised myself I'd never take ASL or Spanish. Well, what started as a meeting to discuss switching classes--which I did not do--ended up an hour and a half session with me in tears talking about why I'm afraid that I hate nursing already when it's only been two weeks.

My advisor is a lovely woman. She means well, she really does. If I were relying solely on her faith in me to get through the program, I'd surely believe that I would be awesome for this career. Unfortunately, there's much more to it than that. I'm quite convinced, based on my personal feelings as well as some of the things that I was told in that meeting by another member of the Lourdes staff (and by that, I mean someone else who was not my amazing advisor), I'm not cut out for nursing anymore. A part of me is grieving about that because it's what I've worked so hard for these last two years. Another part of me is relieved. Based on my feelings, I'm making the decision to finish this semester and change majors. To what, I'm not entirely sure yet.

One thing I do know is that I love teaching. Supplemental instruction at Owens definitely showed me that teaching was something that I enjoyed, which I had suspected all along. I could see myself teaching English at either a high school or college level--or, hell, both! I could also see myself going into something like social work. I'd want to work with teenagers in some way. I don't really think teenagers are appreciated enough. I could see myself teaching high school English while I work on getting a master's or Ph. D. to teach college-level English classes.

Additionally, English has been something I've always enjoyed. No matter what was going on in my life or in the rest of my school career--if you can call my lacking commitment to anything in high school "scholarly" or "career"--I always loved and excelled in English. It's always been a forte of mine. I always enjoyed the reading and the interpretation. The last English class that I took, the instructor asked for a copy of my paper to share with her future classes as an example of how to write the assignment correctly. I really feel like maybe this is supposed to happen. Maybe this is where I'm supposed to be. Maybe English or social work or whatever else are the real reason that I'm not enjoying nursing.

I have all semester to start thinking about what I'll do with next semester, in the midst of trying not to sink into nursing hell. I just think it's pretty vital for me to admit, at this point, that this field isn't for me anymore, despite the fact that I want for it to be. And that's okay too.