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It’d been a quiet, little shift. 7:00 to 15:00, clocked out and said my farewells, had my friend take a polaroid of me in front of the hospital gate with my newly-gifted instax. I walked to the car, got in, and sat in the silence and surprising heat of a March sun.
So this is it, I guess.
The identity crises, the late night wanderings, the endless steps and runs and back and forths. The horrible memories and insanely good ones. I left them among those hospital walls and in a neatly placed folder in my phone gallery.. and I’m never coming back.
Two and a half years are nothing, compared to a human lifetime, compared to the age of the Earth.. but it was almost everything to me. At the start of that era, I’d been a pharmacy school graduate, with her eyes fixed on getting hired in one of the best hospitals in the region, be there beside her father in his cancer journey, and develop her own cancer knowledge along the way.
But life is everchanging, and the rising and falling tides of change brought on the continuous relapsing of my father, and then his death. Then, I was presented with an ultimatum: pay the price for what I’d always considered my passion and dream job, by remaining in a toxic, consuming environment that did not value my presence and took advantage of my giving nature; or leave with no backup plans in mind–simply because it was not possible with the constantly shifting schedule and the recovering from the burnout of living in the cancer-caregiver shoes for what seemed like all of my adult life.
I chose the latter.
And driving away from that building felt like a spectrum of emotions; an array of things that did not match, did not make sense, and came rushing over me in waves, knocking the breath out of me. I was relieved to be away from what felt like a huge prison with fancy doors and polished floors. I was guilty for leaving some of the best friendships I’d built behind. I felt unsafe for the lack of a backup plan and the endless swarm of adulthood responsibilities lying ahead of me. I felt terrified of having to build relationships in a new workplace where nobody had yet seen the best or worst of me, but rather a mutated version of who I used to be. And above all, I felt incomprehensibly, unfathomably tired. Exhausted out of my brains, forgiving of anything that I could or would have. I was letting go of every single expectation or plan I had for my adult life.
I come to write this after 2 months of thinking I found out what I wanted to do, thinking I felt better, relapsing, going on a vacation, relapsing again, finding an opportunity, and realizing that the healing era will NOT be an easy trip.
Nothing about starting over looks like waking up early on a shiny sunlit morning, making your favorite drink, going to read a book, buying flowers for yourself, and whatever cutesy coming-of-age 2000s movie has made it look like. It’s quite messy, to be completely honest. I’ve had my room messier than when I was doing 12-hour shifts, I’ve had crying spells and breakdowns worse than when I was driving home from the first shift after my father died among those walls. There were deep fatigue and pain phases where my limbs felt too heavy to carry out of my bed, where my brain fog felt like a black, haunting thunderstorm washing through my head.
Starting over is unsettling, ugly, and forces you to put up boundaries in ways that will break you, constantly. The fake nostalgia for what used to be will shatter your heart, and the thought that you have to start building, over and over again, and that there will be many more starting-overs in your life will probably have you sitting on your toilet for hours after 2 am wondering what the hell did you just do.
What really matters? Choosing yourself. Again, and again, and again.