nursingforsocialjustice

Not many things keep me up at night. Lately, the anxiety I feel about not knowing the next move in my nursing career has kept me away from serene nighttime slumber.

Mid-Life Crisis?

I turn 40 this year. My almost 11 year old daughter asked me then other day if I was going to have a mid-life crisis. Initially ready to school her on 1) what a young cool mom I am, and half my life not being over 2) having an amazing life, I stopped in that moment and thought, maybe half my life is almost over if the measure is the average lifespan of the Canadian woman. And, that was followed by a big think about where I am in my life.

The Big Think

I don’t know if the next decade will be my decade of professional peaks. In many ways career development is not something that we plan for as nurses. I have worked with many nurses who work to live, where the day to day direct-care, staff nurse gig is a means to an end. I once learned from a colleague that after working in variously high acuity and fast-paced settings they were now biding their time in a fairly secure, relatively low stress direct care job until retirement…which it turned out is going to be 10 years (10 years?!) from when we had that conversation. That blew my mind. In my 13 years as a nurse I have had more than a dozen different positions.

My career has ebbed and flowed as it needed to, when I wanted to learn new things, accommodate my partner going back to school (to also become a nurse), and my growing family. But, now that I am perhaps approaching the middle of my nursing career, I am both frustrated and disappointed that I am not finding the leadership positions that I thought we only out of my reach because I wanted them to be. I am finding that I am at a crossroads in my career, and I don’t know where to go to change direction.

I don’t know if nursing is commonly considered a profession that career-oriented budding healthcare and social justice leaders flock to. However, nursing a long-standing means for women to enter into the workforce, playing a viable choice for women to economically support themselves at a time when women had few career options. Today, women in Canada have a variety of career options depending on their preference, access and socio-economic positioning. Nursing continues to have a much higher ratio of women to men. But, do many women choose nursing over other professions? And, if not, why not?

I did not choose nursing because I conceptualized it as a high profile career. I chose it because I did not know what else to do with my life, after being slapped in the face with the not so shocking reality that my undergraduate degrees in sociology and psychology gave me opportunity to work in low paying jobs that seemed to have no security or possibility of advancement.

So What Now?

The reality of my nursing career has been wonderful. I have worked with many great people (work colleagues and patients) and learned so much about the social justice issues I thought my sociology degree would lead me to. But I’m finding now that I’m kind of stuck in a place where I am no longer a young nurse wanting to make lateral career changes to learn about different patients, people, populations and services. I want to transition to a new place where I can influence bigger changes…but I don’t know how to get there. And, in some ways, I feel like my career is stalled out.

Have you ever felt afraid that you were turning into the over the hill and out of touch nurse no longer on the fast track, and worried that younger nurses with fewer life burdens, less tying them down, less to lose, were taking rocketing ahead and leaving you in the dust?

I need a radical re-frame, a catalyst to a cognitive shift and a boost to my self-esteem. I’m not sure how I get there when I feel so exhausted. And so, another night passes, another anxiety pit grows in bottom of my tummy, paralyzingly so. I’m not sure how to bust through this and come out stronger on the other side.

Peace,

Michelle D.