The great uni debate - I just don't know
A page in the diary "A Day in the Life Of..."
Written by babz 14. Feb 2008 05:42 PM
Like any good debate, this one is completely and utterly inside my head and is between myself and myself.
This year is my third year out of high school, although I have only completed the equivalent of half a semester due to my illnesses. Perhaps in a way this is a blessing, because I have had time out of school, and I have seen the 'real' world. In some ways I think I have an advantage over my friends who went straight from 7 years of primary school into 6 years of high school into 5 years of a law or medicine degree - who will graduate with their prestigious degrees and have no experience to go with it. I'm betting half of them will realise they don't ACTUALLY want to be a lawyer or a doctor - they just like the IDEA of being a layer or a doctor.
Anyway, I digress. I have come to realise that whilst I am passionate about my volunteer aid work, I don't think I want it to be my career. Don't get me wrong, I don't care about it any less because I don't want to be paid to do it, I just don't think it is what I want to go to work and do every day for most of my life (damn that made me sound self-centred).
I fell onto aid work completely by chance - I was 17 and all I knew was that I wanted to help people, and the chance to go to Africa and volunteer all but fell in my lap. From then on I latched onto the idea like a dog with a bone and didn't let go. The idea that I could help so many people and make the world a better place was alluring to me, and not purely for selfless reasons, I won't lie about that.
Now I see that I don't have to wipe out poverty and change the world to change SOMEONE'S world. Since late 2005 I have had over 50 hospital admissions - some of them psych hospitals/wards, some after overdoses/self-harm and a handful for issues unrelated in any way to my mental health.
I've forgotten most of the details of the admissions, but there are a few things that stick out in my mind - the psych registrar that sat with me and talked to me long after his shift had finished because it was the first time I had ever stayed in hospital and was distraught. The nurse that sat there and cried with me after I was raped. The doctor that came into my hospital room to find me hiding under the desk crying and offered his hand to help me up and also stayed late into the night. The nurse that let me stay way after visiting hours after all the drama and upset with Chris. The nurse in emergency that saw I was crying after an overdose and came and stroked my hair until I fell asleep. The nurse that believed in me more than I believe in myself.
I could go on and on and on, but my point is that in some way, these people stuck in my mind. They probably won't get the Nobel Peace Price, they won't have fame, they're all ridiculously underpaid, and they probably won't change the world, but they changed MY world. I was one patient, one day. These people work 40 or so hours a week, probably about 48 weeks a year for 40 years of their life. Think of how many times they've changed one person's world.
I wanted to be a psych nurse way before I even knew what an aid worker was, in some ways it stuck in the back of my mind despite my dog-with-a-bone attitude about aid work, and now it has come to the forefront again. Not for the semi-selfish reasons I wanted to be an aid worker, but because I KNOW how much people with mental illness need the nurse that will stroke their hair after an overdose, or talk to them when they need someone to talk to, or even just someone to treat them like a human being when everyone else treats them like dirt.
DBT teaches you to trust your intuition and your own 'inner wisdom', but I'm not sure whether this is actually intuition or me just desperately searching for a new identity for myself, an impulse to feed my BPD.
I don't trust that this desire to be a nurse is real. I don't trust that I can get through a nursing degree. I don't trust that I would even be a good nurse. I don't trust myself to throw away all the "I should"s and go with the "I want"s. I don't trust myself to let go of my International Studies degree, thereby letting go of the last part of who I thought I "should" be back in year 12 before life threw me the mother of all curve balls.
I can't believe I'm crying over a uni degree. My God I sound so pathetic, but I think I needed a vent. And no, I don't actually expect anyone to have read this far. I rant too much.