How I Overcame My Biggest Failure
Such articles first appeared on QuietRev.com
Last year, I decided to make a massive job change: I would stop writing, and I would become a nurse.
The decision was simpler than the process. To pass the enter exam for wet-nurse academy, this Art and Theater major had to pull out all the stops in the math and science departments. I knew it would take some doing. And I guessed( rightly) that I couldn’t do it alone.
So, I jostle my usual introvert ways to the side, and, readers, I hustled . I said my intention loudly and clearly to the universe–i.e ., Facebook. I networked with as many nurse pals as I could track down. I questioned a teacher friend to tutor me for long hours in math( never my strong suit–the asking for help or the math ). I learned Pressure Laws and osmosis and torso systems and what the Golgi Apparatus was for by watching science videos on YouTube with my daughters. I pleaded with my family for more assist around the house so I could devote myself to studying like a madwoman for the entryway exam.
I extended the quiz with flying colors. I even rocked the interview( and promptly go back home and passed out from the exercise ).
I got in.
Once more, I channeled my inner extrovert and posted the good news. My parents and my brother( a medical doctor) were over the moon. Facebook cheered for me: For a single momma, nursing is much more practical than writing! Finally, steady income! Your girls must be so proud !
When my academy supplies–books, stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, and requisite white clogs–arrived in the mail, I could practically savor the sterile tang of my Florence Nightingale future. This was it . I had finally–after half a lifetime of searching and not-finding–discovered my calling. I would rock school like I’d rocked the entire admissions process, I decided. In fact, I would rock the particular profession. I would become a registered nurse someday. I would ultimately become a respectable grownup, with a respectable profession. I had this in the bag .
Insert vinyl record screech.
Five days later, as I bawl uncontrollably at the dining room table, surrounded by a castle wall’s merit of nurse text and first week’s homework, my nursing daydream crashed and burned. Spectacularly.
To be clear: I had been crying since the first day of class culminated. The program–a one-year intensive LPN course–ran from 3:45 p.m. to 10: 15 p.m. every day, five courses at a time. The class itself was large-hearted and boisterous, vastly different from my house environment, where I was used to writing alone with a hound at my paws. I stammered through class presents, my look reddened and my hands shaking. I was drained and on edge and couldn’t consider straight. The multi-tasking was frying my brain. Ancient OCD symptoms burst forth like a sprinkling of springtime buds: I couldn’t brush my notebook newspaper with the side of my hand without wanting to puking. No , I envisioned. Not now. It had been a long while. I was daunted, but I was also furious at the limits of my own brain.
I’ve written openly in the past about my lifelong debilitating anxiety and suicidal depression. I take an laughable number of medications daily to deter my snarling demons mollified by period and to set them to sleep at bedtime. I verify my psychiatrist regularly. I am a good psych patient because I have to be. It’s what keeps me alive, and my daughters require me alive.
With the advent of wet-nurse school, I was not sleeping. When I did manage to fall asleep, with the assistance of sedatives that would bring down a rhino, terror nightmares slammed me awake, nerve jackhammering in my ribcage. My brain was saying: BUT WE HAVE TO KEEP GOING. EVERYBODY KNOWS. WE’VE COME THIS FAR. But my form was telling my psyche otherwise: NICE TRY. NO WAY.
Part of being a good mental health issues patient is active self-awareness; it’s knowing the difference between a fleeting emotion( “Jeez, the deli segment is truly emphasizing me out today”) and the potent bowel instinct say to you that you’ve taken a terribly incorrect turning and that if you don’t listen up, there will be hell to pay.
I knew the answer, but I wished I didn’t: In this case, it was the latter. There would be hell to pay. My daughters knew it too. My younger one , now 12, climbed into my lap as I was sobbing onto my pilings of homework. She articulated, “Mom, I think there’s got to be a better route. This just isn’t your right way.”
She’d nailed it. This was the wrong program for me. It didn’t topic that I was off to a good-enough start, shaping pals and scoring high marks on quizzes. It didn’t question that the Facebook family members or friends belief I could just push through and succeed. What mattered was the fact that I was most surely going to torpedo my mental health if I retained running like this. A peculiar paradox: read to mend others would entail I’d be harming myself.
I formally withdrew from the programmes. And there it was: total and total failure, impossible to hide.
My nursing teachers were understanding and supportive of my is a requirement to bow out. I think you’d be a extremely honorable addition to being able to our profession , one wrote to me afterward. I tried not to care about what others would think. I coiled into my introverted ego and lay low, licking my meanders. But the messages flooded in: How are classes starting? Bet you’re killing it !
I finally posted on Facebook a brief message to explain to well-wishers that I wouldn’t be continuing with this particular nurse program. All of the kind, reassuring notes I received vanished in the face of the single disapproving statement: Didn’t you only start? Did you at least make it to the end of a semester ?
I think it’s hard for most people to reframe a mash frustration as a detour or a plot twisting. In this case, my failure experienced especially destroying because I had invited the world in to witness my excursion. I had extroverted my direction into a success that proved to be something else, and now there was nowhere to hide. Borrowing moxie from my extroverted friends and families had helped me achieve a aim, that was certain. What would be facilitated me get past this setback?
As usual, my super-extrovert mom promoted immediate action. “Become a certified nurse aide! Here’s a link to a Red Cross program that starts on Sunday! ” Exuberant pals texted theories: “Approach a hospice middle and tell them you’ll work for free for a customized on-the-job training program! ” “Shift to Health Informatics! ” “Move to Hawaii! ”
Instinctively, I recoiled from all the advice. “I need to regroup, ” I told everyone. The believed to be plunging down another route before I’d sorted out what had just happened was absolutely horrifying. I knew in my gut the only voice I needed to hear was mine–and the blare was way too loud for me to find it.
Why were the extroverts in “peoples lives” pressing for more action rather than introspection? Well, Eyneck’s analyses on cortisol–the so-called “arousal” hormone–found that extroverts have lower levels of cortisol on a regular basis, which sends them careening into the world for new suffers and new interactions. People self-identifying as introverts measured using higher, more constant levels of cortisol. In other terms, introverts don’t need to find stimulant: it notes them, and additional interaction can make them overstimulated and stressed.
Don’t dwell so much better on it was the constant be prohibited from my extrovert relatives and cronies. But mourning and brooding is exactly what conducted me to a shift in thinking. I gave myself permission to process the failure in my own style and time. Peculiarity prominent in introverted people( often described in the context of Carl Jung’s research and Myers-Briggs sorts) include deducing vigor from period alone and constructing alternatives intentionally without the need for others’ input. My extroverts didn’t like the appear of it, but my truest self sure did.
I knew it was back to the drawing board for me, which intended new planning and hard-core problem solving: precisely the stuff that we introverts excel at. One well-documented study found that introverts possess greater blood flowing in the frontal lobes of the brain as well as the frontal and anterior thalamus–all parts of the brain equipped for heavy-duty internal processing. In a sudden and welcome lightbulb minute, I wondered if I was maybe better equipped than my extroverted loved ones to handle failing, to find the lesson in it, and to accommodate accordingly?
I decided to go for broke: I would surrender entirely to my introvert routes and recognize where they took me. Several deactivations and unsubscribes from social media accounts and an untold number of marketing emails afterwards, I experienced unburdened. I was still smarting, for sure, but my introvert soul seemed more in control and more at peace, better are available to ponder my next move. Disclaimer: I did keep one online account, Pinterest. Minimal human interaction was still required, and where better to curate my collect of reassuring mentions about recovering from omission? Terms from those who’d determined vocation shipwrecks and lived to right their vessels were suddenly as relieving to me as ocean air 😛 TAGEND
Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again . — Henry Ford
I have not neglected. I’ve just observed 10,000 spaces that won’t project . — Thomas A. Edison
Big words like these rendered much needed perspective. Perhaps I was simply beginning again, intelligently. I’d cordoned off a track that wouldn’t work for me–but maybe now I was one stair closer to finding one that would . Now, if simply I could find the map.
After a few melancholy weeks of radio stillnes with “the worlds” and connection with myself, I woke up one morning with a very concrete( and writerly) query in my psyche :< em> What was my underlying theme, after all ?
I sat with my coffee and pondered my original motivation for all the work that I’d put in to get into nursing school. I’d lost vision of it in all the talk and motion. I’d attempted a nursing program for a reason bigger than the paycheck, the security, and the adorably utilitarian clogs: I’d just wanted to help people . I may have bombed at this specific nursing school program, but could I find other ways to pitch in in my community while I figured out what went next? Emphatically. Would that lead to something? Maybe.
I started the working day by signing up at Volunteer Match( volunteermatch.org ), a website that matches volunteers to neighbourhood community jobs, based on each volunteer’s specific skills and abilities and predilections. My girls and I have been volunteering for several years with a local Meals on Wheels organization, but I knew I could surely do more now with the extra day. Through Volunteer Match, I was linked to an organization in our rural area that provides support to new moms in need of weekly help and companionship. This was an admittedly extroverted undertaking, but I realized that working directly with a family in need felt the closest to what I’d hoped to do with nursing. I took the immerse and signed up. I felt a quiet yes in my gut. I also applied–and was accepted–to start train as a volunteer crisis counselor at Crisis Text Line. When I finish my education, I’ll be working a four-hour transformation each week, helping people in crisis stabilize and find the resources necessary. So although I miscarried at one thing, colossally, I’ll still be honoring my primary motivation–helping others–and let that be my new North Star.
In addition to volunteering, I went back to the career drawing board. I stirred rosters of other possible employment creation and courses. I emailed for informed on everything from different nursing programs( one or two classes at a time) to certificate programs in genealogy. I stopped checking in nervously with the world and simply checked in with me. It would be a year of introspection be included with action , no matter how small. It would be the year of little promises stopped and medium-sized commitments honored.
I couldn’t stop writing–I required meat and heating petroleum, after all. Was there a different way of looking at my writing, then? Could I get better at it this year? I didn’t know, but I could try: I signed up for a summertime writing meeting( a very small one, simply 12 novelists) to work on my craftsmanship with the assistance of other like-minded spirits. Could I find new opportunities in the same age-old arena? I peeked out of my turtle eggshell to ask my editor if she saw there might be room for an advice tower here at Quiet Revolution, one manager up by my inner grouchy introvert. To my great surprise and pleasure, my editor gave me the thumbs-up–which entails my most authentic self gets to be a bossyboots know-it-allon a regular basis.( My authentic ego is chuffed .)
I made another deal with myself. I’d do one creative thing a period: write a poem, take a photograph, sketch a cartoon, hike with the dogs, mail someone a handmade card, teach myself to shape lemon curd( maybe I’d find out what lemon curd was first–thank you, my beloved Pinterest ). These were tiny actions in the grand strategy of life, but I liked being accountable to myself for abiding creative and remaining employed with my own life in ways that have always me quiet, intense joy.
Months after what I find as my biggest los, the peace and quiet I’ve allowed myself in real life and online in this pain, awkward, transitional period signifies my inner voice have continued pipe up regularly in a way it hasn’t in a very long time. I’ve committed my bowel permission to talk to each other, and my gut knows I am ultimately listening. Yes. Maintain proceeding. Add only what establishes feel. Let run of what the hell are you don’t need .
Do I know what the future holds for me, career-wise? Nope. But do I still feel like a los, afraid to show my face? No. And that comes as a pleasant surprise. I’m doing things my route, and I’m potting the process has more astonishes in store. The travel has already become, maybe for the first time ever, more interesting than research results. I honestly feel right, more in the moment, more grounded, and simply more myself. It’s not a nursing degree or a steady paycheck, but you know what? I’ll take it.
Read more: http :// www.huffingtonpost.com/ 2016/05/ 09/ how-i-overcame-my-biggest-failure_n_1 0261202. html
Posted by dj0pium- Posted in DJ News
Jul, 28, 2017
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