Changes and their Spillover

At the beginning of April, I had my last day at the job I had had, across 5 different emergency hospitals, for pretty much 15 years. Since 2009, I have worked in the ICU of these emergency and specialty veterinary hospitals, caring for dogs and cats that ranged from only slightly sick (ate chocolate) to walking the edge of the grave (sometimes stepping in). I have seen so much pain, suffering, grief, joy, love, neglect, sadness, and gratitude. As one might expect, the weight of those emotions finally started to pile up within me so much so that I didn’t really have room for anything else. Then a beautiful opportunity presented itself, the timing was right with some money in savings, and I made the jump.

Along with this opportunity came almost a full month of time to myself. I made mental lists of all that I would accomplish during this time, sure that I would get all of my dreams off the ground without work in the way. You’re probably reading this and knowing exactly what happened. I did hardly any of those things. As it turned out, I really needed to decompress. I needed to go to yoga every day, I needed to tune out from things that caused me anguish, I needed to do nothing if I was ever going to do something again. Is this luxury something that is available to everyone? No. If it becomes possible, should you take it? Yes. Do I think that everyone needs to take a month off of working to figure out what their next step is? I mean YEAH, but I know that isn’t realistic.

One of the things that has been central to this idea of being a nutritionist has been that this care is for everyone, not just the affluent. Not just those with expendable income, and not just those with endless free time. Turns out that a lot of what I learned with my time off has more to do with knowing our limits and not attaching self-worth to our expectations for ourselves. Probably didn’t need a full month to realize that, but here we are.