an extension of a heart

I took a yoga class on the second to last day of this year. The instructor kept repeating that your arms are the extension of your heart. Which made me think an awful lot about the kind of job I do and the way my hands have felt about physical healing, recently. I took a contract in Denver because I wanted to see how I felt about nursing after everything that I had experienced in the past couple months. After spending so many months feeling like the most authentic and honest version of me, this job has made me realize that I am nowhere close to being my best self while also being a nurse. It has opened my eyes to a lot of unhealthy habits and negative emotional energy that I give off. It has made my hands tense with knots and my eyes weary of the constant charting that never seems to be enough. I’ve grown so impatient with myself, with my patients, with healthcare, and humans’ abilities to heal and suffer that there are some days where I feel completely cracked in half.

While I was in Minnesota visiting my family over Christmas, I was expressing this to some of them. My mom actually came up with a brilliant idea to write dying people’s stories. Ever since I was little I would ask people about their lives and I’d sit in front of them for minutes to hours as they’d tell me story after story. I’d laugh and cry with them. I’d ooo and aww. But most of the time I was just quiet. Simply listening. Humans are truly astounding and hearing about peoples’ lives, their downfalls and triumphs, gives me such great hope in this existence. That is not something nursing has ever provided for me. When I am writing is when I feel the weight of suffering and death, the grip of my reoccurring nightmares, the screech of alarms and wails, tubes and lines, pounding and breathing finally lift off of me. I feel clear. And I see so much more than pain and death.

I am rather sensitive when conversations arrive to topics of healing. As though, there is something wrong with me for feeling like i have never reached the top of my mountain, have never seen the light after all of this, and only the light. When I was in high school and decided I wanted to be a nurse, I thought that helping others heal would help me with my own journey, and it has in many ways, yet it hasn’t in many others. This job has strained and stretched my heart beyond what I believed to be capable in a human. And I’ve watched as it’s shredded my nurse friends in return. The problem with what high school mads believed was that healing had to be hands on. It had to be in the most vulnerable of moments, when people became their worst selves, when critical decisions and time were not a luxury. But all that’s done for me is led me down a path of impatience and discouragement.

I healed more in the time I spent walking across an entire country than I have in the five years that I have been healing others through nursing. And it’s because it took time. I couldn’t speed walk across Spain in twelve hours no matter how fast I was. I took the time to complete the whole thing, focusing on myself everyday for thirty one days. But isn’t that the entire purpose of healing, the journey itself? Healing isn’t a means to an end and there’s truly no finality in it. It’s a daily process to notice. When my fingers are scrawling the pages of a notebook or skipping across the keys of a laptop, energy sprouts, which makes complete sense when you think about what that yoga instructor said. I don’t believe I’ve ever written anything that wasn’t directly from the chambers and edges of my heart, so if my hands are an extension of that, what better way to provide honest, loving, authentic healing than creating? So I think I might try listening to people’s stories, and hopefully, eventually be able to give it the justice it deserves, to extend a healing heart to other hearts that are on a journey.