Being on the road, not working and simply traveling, I wonder what will become of my identity as a nurse and a health care provider. While I still introduce myself as a nurse, I begin to wonder to myself just what that means exactly. Am I a nurse because I think like one? Is it the tattered license in my wallet? Or is it the fourteen years of experience that simply make it so? Is my "nurseness" still intact when on sabbatical, or does it take a back seat to my basic humanity?
These days of living on the road with my wife and dog as peripatetic travelers is beginning to challenge even my own self-perception of who I really am. An enormous part of my identity has been wrapped up in being a nurse for more than a decade now, and as we embrace the open road and all it has to offer, that very identity is shaken to the core. Still, it's a comfort to have both a vocation and a calling that serve both my sense of identity and my ability to be economically stable.
For now, we travel the highways and byways of the United States, and I will eventually christen my work as a health and wellness coach, taking my work as a nurse to a new level of novelty and service. Til then, my "nurseness" is simply a state of mind!
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