Square One a.k.a. What the Hell Do I Do NOW?

Tomorrow morning I am going to Oak Park to attend an Open House for Resurrection University. ResU is the nursing school that is affiliated with the hospital I currently work at. After working for over two months as a nursing assistant, I have decided, with conviction that I want to continue on and become a registered nurse. Now if you’d told me that this is what I would be doing a year ago, I would have scoffed at the idea. 

A year ago at this time I was in my own business and my stress levels were such that I felt like I was completely at the end of my rope. I was overwhelmed and I had hit the wall emotionally and creatively. It was a difficult process to accept that now that I had reached the end of my rope, I had to let it go. I was certain that my life was going to be over. I had failed. I would get another job in retail and I would try to work around that dead place inside me that I imagine all my disappointment and heartache goes. 

The condensed version goes like this; the one business partner got a new business partner and they bought the business from my and the other partner. While there was a sense of relief, the feelings of loss and failure still held on. So rather than looking at what lay before me and trying to figure out which direction to go from there, I decided to go back to square one, aka what the hell do I do now? 

Here’s how that happened. After my best friend got sick a while back, I wanted to do something to help. He was stuck in another state and needed live in help. So I started looking at caregivers where he was. From there was a link to home health care. From there was a link to nursing assistants. Now all of this happened about a year before I left the business. He got his help and I filed this idea away in the back of my head and kept pulling away. When the stress of the business became too much, I pulled out the nursing assistant idea and dusted it off. 

Once again, I started researching nursing assistants and what the job entailed. I found a program that I applied to that was taught by the hospital I work at now. I called and scheduled an appointment to be interviewed for a spot in the class. I went and bought a new dress shirt and tie for the interview. I sat down and wrote out my resume, digging through old paperwork to get dates right. I went to the interview, filled out the application and talked to two of the instructors. I got a call back from one of the instructors telling me that I had been accepted and would need to come in and undergo a back ground check. I showed up at the place, on the date, with a check for the course. I answered the questions on the piece of paper from my social security number to what my last three addresses had been. My background check came back clear and gave them the check. On the first day of the class, I showed up, my check for the balance in hand. I was given my text book and told to take a seat. 

And that’s what going back to square one consisted of. 

I broke it down to these statement sentences to illustrate that I had to do each of these things, in the exact order that they were done. One action built off of the next. And so on. My initial problem when I was first considering changing careers was that I was trying to look at the big picture. And there’s nothing too unusual about that, because we’ve been taught to ‘look at the big picture’ when trying to assess the current situation. But looking at the big picture only paralyzes me because I lose sight of where to start. 

Everything has a beginning, a starting point, the first thing you have to do before you can do anything else. When I remember to break it down to its parts, keeping in mind that each part has its own starting point, the problem is a little more palatable. For example, in the process of trying to sort out all the things I need to do to enter a nursing program, I know that I will have to take some prerequisite classes BEFORE I can even start a BSN program. One of the things I need to take is a math course. 

Remembering a story I saw on Nightline about some online math tutoring videos, I did an internet search and quickly found what I was looking for. When I went to the website I saw that there are thousands of videos, not just on Math, but on Chemistry and Biology. Both of these are also in my prerequisites. While I may have been compelled to ‘check out’ the Chemistry and Biology videos, I didn’t. I focused on the basics of Algebra. 

Now I’d taken an Algebra class back in 2000 when I took a few classes at one of the community colleges. Because I’d been so awful at Algebra in high school I was really apprehensive about taking it then. But I applied myself and finished the class with a 104 GPA. I did all the extra work as well. So the idea of refreshing myself with these Algebra videos wasn’t as scary as it was bothersome. I assumed that everything I’d learned was gone. But I quickly found out that it wasn’t. 

And now I amuse myself by going through the math levels on this site. I always get a charge out of moving to the next level. My goal is to get all the way down to the bottom row of this Knowledge Map, which is Quotient Rule, Product Rule, Chain Rule 1, Parabola intuition 3. Don’t know what any of that is at this moment, but that doesn’t mean I won’t ever know it. If I do the first thing and build on that, then eventually I’ll get to the goal. 

I have a few other goals that I want to accomplish, many of them much smaller in scope than going to school to become a nurse. But one of the things that I’ve come to realize is that while some accomplishments are bigger than others, each one adds another layer of confidence that wasn’t there before. With confidence comes certainty. With certainty comes a sense of presence in the moment. That sense nurtures a feeling of being solid, whole and comfortable in my own skin. 

One of my new goals is to make chicken and dumplings. I don’t think I’ve had chicken and dumplings since my Grandma made them for me. And she passed away in 1979. So it’s been a while. The other day me and my friend Kookie went to the grocery store. As luck would have it, they had flour, butter and whole chickens on sale. Like I do with a lot of stuff I make, I’ll probably post a picture of it on my Facebook page when I make it. 

And I can promise you this; I will make it.