2025! What a year! The emotional highs and lows were palpable due to outside influence including work, news, weather, social media, and most importantly, the people you surround yourself with. I don’t know about you, but this year kicked my ass emotionally…..in a good way. I figured out who I don’t want to be, however, I haven’t really figured out who I want to be. I know I want to keep being a better person all around, but to accomplish this, you have to tune out the outside noise including social media, negative people, and your negative thoughts/feelings. It was a lonely year. I feel like I don’t fit in, that’s ok.
Who do I want to be? I have become the person who doesn’t give a flying shit what people think of me. Check. Why I published my soul into my book. Being a published author writing a memoir is not for the lighthearted, let me tell you. I read not so nice reviews and thought to myself, what does that person have going on? Nothing….that’s why they right a shit review. AND to tell you the truth, most negative reviews are nurses! They just haven’t found the bright and shiny light yet. But either have I. Not saying I am depressed or sad, but I feel like a could raise it up a notch. But is that who I truly am? Bright and shiny? Ummm..no, people wouldn’t give me those adjectives. They would give me confident and focused.
I fly under the radar at times, except for when I am writing of course! But in the outside world, I do find myself as a confident person except for one time this year when I tried to respiratory arrest a guy and put him six feet under sooner than he hoped. My peers got him back though. I tell you what, that was a slap in my nursing face. The guilt and the non-self-confidence came through the window that doesn’t open in hospitals and engulfed me. Felt like a total failure. Asked myself, why in the hell am I here? I did have a self-identity crisis, not the gender kind, but the kind….I am turning in my badge and giving up twenty years of my life because I may have done something wrong crisis.
After that experience, I had to admit two chemo patients an hour later and put on my bright and cheery smile. See people, this is why nurses have personality issues, our highs and lows get jolted a couple times a day making us seem crazy on the inside. Focus, ok, the two chemo patients, two of the kindest people I have met lately. Why? They have a cancer diagnosis. So, I have been thinking a lot about this lately. Why do the chemo diagnosis patients, well at least 90 percent of them, so kind? Let me tell you, they don’t care about the petty shit anymore. Because they don’t know how much time they have on this dome filled Earth. They let all the past drama go, don’t care about the little things, and are grateful every day they wake up in their beds. So why doesn’t each and every one of us do this? I mean why don’t we wake up and be grateful for what we have and let the resentment go? We haven’t got the death sentence yet. Therefore, as humans we hold on until some life altering diagnosis or experience takes us over knowing we have limited time and need to make the best of things.
I am guilty of this as well! However, better than I used to be. I was so depressed and anxious, on multiple medications just to get through the day! I paved my journey back then and I am still paving the way now! When will people wake up and understand people are not out to get them. Do people need to wake up, tell themselves they have a cancer diagnosis, so they live up their days? Mindset. Mind over Matter. Now, do I want you to tell yourself you have this diagnosis to make your days better? No. I just want you to stop thinking so much. I want you to not care what other people are thinking about you. Newsflash, no one gives a crap what you are thinking. We are self-absorbed as I have said before. You are criticizing yourself; that’s on you.
2026, the path to enlightenment. I want to be enlightened this year. I want to learn how to keep letting go of the small things that I created to be big things. I want to be that author who wrote that book to make a difference in people’s life again. I am excited about this next year, I am not going to do much different, but I am going to think differently. I am going to continue to work on myself. Little fun fact, I have been going to counseling for ten years now. It feels like it’s been a lifetime because I have changed so much. However, I thought it was five years. Nope, ten. High five for me. 2026, no cancer diagnosis, just the “let live,” diagnosis.
Brooke's Honest and Truth Blog, RN 