So, I'm Going into Nursing...

This one is going to be a bit stream-of-conscious-y.  

It seems that I can't do things small.  When I get sick, I don't just get a cold--I get something that will knock my legs out from underneath me and linger in curious ways.  Our household has seemed to similarly stack our life transitions one on top of the other.  I know that past performance does not guarantee future results, but it is weird for, say, also buying our first house AND suddenly looking for a new car, such as the case was last year.  

So it only makes sense in the middle of a pandemic that I put in my two weeks notice for my job.

Okay, to be fair, I have been planning this for literal years.  With many things, I tend to make a decision and then proceed to focus my energy convincing myself to allow myself permission to follow through on that decision, for what sense that makes outside of my brain circuits.  

I've been contemplating going into nursing for some time, particularly to be a wound/ostomy care nurse.  To be in a place where I can so uniquely express that compassion by identification is singing a clarion call that I had been meeting at least in part through this blog and talking with individuals--this gives me a place to take it that one step further.  

And all of that is a highfalutin way of saying I'm ready to move toward a new career.  

SO MANY FEELINGS

I have been accepted to the Mennonite College of Nursing accelerated program at ISU.  It starts in the summer session.  I applied to this a year ago February and found out that I was offered a space in August, two weeks after I had signed all the paperwork for a manager position at Skyward--again, things line up in weird ways for our household.  

Truth be told, I had been offered a place the year before--I wanted to take the leap then, but Andy had just moved into different position at Skyward (once again, timing is weird in our household) and we crunched the numbers.  We ran and re-ran the math in a dozen and a half different ways:  what we found is that by my staying staying one more year and with some intentional pushing, we could be completely done with student loans prior to taking on any new ones, meaning a bit more stability within the uncertainties.  We did it.  We are Millennial Unicorns and grateful.  That we could even contemplate this situation is a privilege.  

It was a risk to turn it down that year--there was no guarantee I would be accepted the next year nor any means to defer that spot.  It would all be back to the strength of my application.  It hurt to turn it down that year, to willingly delay after all the decisions had been landed on, but in many ways we found the timing was right.  I also was able to steadily make my way through the remaining prerequisite courses one per semester rather than the alternative of forcing all four in a short time while also working full time.  So we knuckled down to a year of steadily eating the elephant of student debt one piece at a time, assessing and reassessing our budget for any places to cinch our belts in further (involving switching our student loan vendor for a lower rate and buying a house to at least lower our monthly housing cost), and otherwise squirreling away whatever we could manage to be as prepared as possible.  

My survival voices are VERY upset.  I am leaving a place of relative security so that we can go down to one income and incur more student debt in addition to opening myself to all kinds of new stress (good and bad, but unknown regardless).  The voices wail:  "How could you open up yourself to risk?  What the hell are you doing?"  The point of those voices is to protect me--they are reactive and they are LOUD--but there comes a point where they're no longer productive.  So I have to intentionally take time with those voices, to show the berating, awful din compassion or otherwise help them redirect to a more constructive vein.  It's tiring, at best.

I've played this whole transition close to the chest.  I've told individuals but hitherto made no mass announcement.  I've said before and will say again that preparation against as many plausible concerns as possible is part of how I cope with my medical anxiety and that definitely extends out into our financial situation; whether we can afford my medical needs is certainly a part of that figuring.  We've agonized and re-run the math for every different situation under the sun (unfortunately, we have some real experience with how a crisis can play out and how to safeguard as much as possible against it), and yet there comes a point where we just have to jump anyway.  My hope was just to make the jump from a lower ledge instead of the summit.  

I acknowledge that fear in the same breath I also acknowledge that I am fully confident this is the right next direction for me.  I'm sad to leave the people I work with and will miss them immensely.  I'm so grateful that there were people in my life that made this decision hard in the right ways.  I'm so grateful, too, have the support of those around me.  

And now that these parts are finally out in the open, I can even let myself begin to feel the weight of my own excitement.  There will be many hijinks ahead (and some I may need to catch you up on).  Stay tuned!