Decisions, decisions, decisions…

You know, I thought that by this point in my life things would be a little bit more concrete and I’d know where I was going... Haha, how silly of me! You know, in high school my counselors AND my parents AND my teachers were always bugging me about what I wanted to do when I “grew up”. I went to career fairs and took classes and workshops to help me decide what I wanted to do, and I decided; I wanted to be a nurse. I took medical anatomy and physiology my junior year of high school, and I loved it! I love to help people and I’m very interested in health care. I spent a lot of time in a doctor’s office as a child and so I saw a lot of nurses, and I decided that this was what I wanted to do. So I’ve spent the last four-ish years struggling towards my dream career. My whole entire college career has been one of extreme stress and anxiety as I’ve taken some of the hardest classes at the university, knowing that I HAD to get extremely good grades in order to even be competitive in my application to the program. I’ve taken chemistry four times now, a subject that I ABSOLUTELY abhor. I mean, classes like microbiology and anatomy were hard, but at least I enjoyed the subject, chemistry has no redeeming qualities in my eyes. Anyway, after fall semester this last year (I took micro, chem, and math 1050!) I was burnt out from all the stress and felt like I was STILL a million miles away from getting into the program, so I quit. I’ve given up on nursing, which actually was a hard decision to make, and I’m still having second thoughts. I mean, while everyone else was struggling to figure out what they were doing with life, I had a plan, and for the past five years I’ve had that goal to guide me. Then suddenly I had no direction! It’s been hard, too, because I really wanted to be a nurse and I’ve been planning and preparing to be a nurse for so long! I feel a little bit like failure. My whole family knows that I’ve trying to get my RN and they respected that, now to go back and tell them that I’ve quit after all this time just makes me feel like such a disappointment. I know it’s prideful of me, but I also miss how prestigious the title of RN is, I mean, when people asked me what I was studying and I said “nursing”, people were always impressed. I felt like I could “compete” I guess with Karl’s mechanical engineering when I was studying nursing, now I feel like I’ve dropped in value somewhat… I know it’s not true, and I’m getting over it (trying to swallow my pride here), but this has been my struggle. It’s also been hard to see several of my friends from high school getting their RNs in the past year or so, I’m really quite jealous! There have been so many feelings associated with this process; I don’t feel like I can even begin to explain it all…

Anyway, now I suppose it is time for a new plan. Part of me really wishes I could just give up on the whole school thing all together and be a stay-at-home mom for the rest of forever (I’m so baby hungry!), but I know that even if I don’t do school right now that’s not a viable option. I also really want to get a degree of some sort (this goes back to my fear of being a failure). So here is my new and revised plan: I’m going to get my associates degree this fall in community health with an emphasis in education, and then in two years I’ll have my bachelors degree (also in community health education). This last semester I took a bunch of classes for this new major and for the first time since I started college I got an A in every single class! I actually enjoyed school for the first time in a very, very long time! So I think this is a good thing for me. I’ve also been realizing in the past few months that nursing would have been a VERY difficult career for me. I am such a high stress person (thanks to my overactive nervous system)I’m afraid that nursing would have been too stressful considering that there are times when people’s lives would be in my hands. Also I don’t have the stamina to work long shifts, my legs and feet hurt so badly after just walking around the grocery store. I’m tired a lot which makes my brain foggy and I forget things a lot. Seeing as the nurse is the last line of defense for the patient, forgetting or not noticing things could be dangerous! I just wish I’d realized this all a lot earlier, I could be done with school by now!

Through this whole process I’ve been learning that I need to do what’s right for me, and it doesn’t matter what other people think. When I made the choice to go to UVU after having starting college at BYU my mom was very upset. I had worked very hard to get into BYU because that’s just what you do if you’re Mormon and intelligent. Everyone around here expects it. UVU has been kind of thought of as an “easy school” since it started as a junior college, but it actually is becoming a very good university, it just has a very old reputation to overcome. It was a very hard decision to leave BYU, but in the end it really wasn’t the place for me and I’m glad I did what I did. I still really miss BYU sometimes, but I’m where I need to be, and I can accept that.