I battled a lot in 2019. I battled myself, I battled at work, I battled at home, I battle with health issues and I would say I even battled with the cats this year. As I happily bid ado to 2019, I am looking back on this year and wondering what I can take with me as I enter 2020.

1. My health – for most of 2019, I was battling a severe and persistent bacterial infection. From February through October, I was consistently on antibiotics to combat this infection. At one point, I had a surgical consult to look at having a partial mastectomy because this infection had spread to a point that was worrisome for sepsis. While trying to figure this all out, I contracted influenza A! In the nick of time, I started responding to a regimen of IV and oral antibiotics. Sadly, in the summer ,the infection then spread to my leg. Super, more antibiotics. I started undergoing test for immunodeficiency syndromes since the type of infection I had is not normally so cumbersome to treat. Fortunately, all were negative and most of the infection is now healed up. I will remain on a low dose of antibiotics for the near future to make sure I don’t develop something this severe again. After seeing 2 specialists and an infectious disease doctor, it was determined that stress was the culprit to these abscesses developing. Since putting in my notice, my blood pressure came down 20 points, I dropped 7 pounds and everything is finally healed.
2. My sanity – oh, 2019….not a great year for my mental health. In combination of persistent health issues, I started really going downhill with the amount of stress in my life. I used to see my therapist monthly, for the past year it has been weekly. Week after week, I sought counsel and insight into my patterns of stress and the behavioral responses that ensued. He pushed me to keep thinking about what my next steps were. Early in the year, I decided I wanted to stay and wanted him to help me figure out ways to deal with my stress so that I could continue forward. Unfortunately, my job changed 4 times in 2019. Each time, the next task was more than I could handle until I finally buckled under the pressure and resigned. I struggled with this decision for months. Therapy was the best thing for me as I needed the space and time to figure out the best path for myself. My therapist will never tell me what he thinks I should do. Some of the time I could tell that he was hoping “today might be the session where she tells me that she quit!” He supported and validated but only to a certain extent. When I would say things like “I am not meant for this field.” He would never agree. He would validate me feeling overwhelmed but never that I wasn’t good enough or not strong enough to be in this field. My mental health is happy to GOOD-BYE to 2019.
3. My future – In October, I really started think – what am I going to do? Is this field for me? Is this a job issue or a field issue? I miss nursing; however, there are nursing jobs I plainly don’t miss. I dug deep and realized, I don’t want to be a counselor. I feel powerless in that position. I was not able to find a good boundary between myself and my work. I took on people’s pain. So much so that I lost me in the process. I never did figure out how to separate myself. In October, I attended the annual competency meeting for transplant. As the other transplant coordinators and I were sitting at lunch, we were talking shop about all sorts of things, with my most favorite conversation – what is your nursing vice. (For the record – pee on me, I am fine. Blood gushing from you wound, all is well! You start making gagging sounds, move over because I am going to be right next to you. Vomit is my nursing vice.) We can ruin so many meals by talking shop. I just kept thinking all day long, “I so miss this. I miss medical. I miss nursing. I miss feeling like I know what the hell I am doing.” Yesterday, I celebrated by 16th anniversary of being an LPN. I want to be an RN. I still have a future in behavioral health, it will be in a different capacity than counseling. I want to teach eventually full time if I could. So, my future started last week as I started my first class towards my RN degree. Official classes start 01/06/2020. I hope to be done  by the fall of 2021.
4. My past – I started to relapse back into my old lifestyle (aka using lifestyle) to a certain degree. I never picked up a drink nor did I have the intention of doing so. However, addiction is sneaky and a relapse starts long before picking up a substance. I found myself dreaming about drinking, using cocaine and even shooting meth (which I have never done). I would wake up in a full blown sweat thinking I lost it all. I started to isolate and let my depression get the better of me. I stopped engaging in things that were so meaningful to me. I stopped enjoying a lot of things that brought me authentic happiness. I was so over-stressed that I could no longer handle getting to work on time or getting to work at all. Being late and having a lot of absenteeism is against my values. When I worked full time in transplant, I remember only calling in sick 3 times over a 3 year period and I was actually pretty ill those times. While I experienced illnesses this year, I feel like I could have pushed through some of those and really made it work. This red flag has been up for me for a while now. It’s just not a good sign. The most painful part of my using years was living and breathing outside of my value system. I know what is right and wrong for me. When I was using, I kept doing all the wrong things because that would feed my habit better than “doing the right thing”. I started getting away from the right things and started to get bitter and angry with myself.

I am in my 10th year of recovery right now. This year holds my 10th sober New Years, Christmas and Thanksgiving. I have a lot to be grateful for. I feel like I had lost touch with that gratitude in this past year. I was too tired to be grateful. I got struck in negative thinking patterns and couldn’t see anything to be grateful for. I became consumed with my job and the subsequent stress. I remember saying so many times in the past year, “if I knew what helped me get better, I would have done it by now!” Well, turned out, resigning my position is getting back on top again. I am seeing the happy “me” coming back out. I am still struggling with some lingering anxiety as I am making some rather large changes at the moment. I do not, however, feel like this is the same anxiety that I felt crippled by for the majority of 2019. This anxiety is a nervous “OMG, what am I doing” coupled with a “I actually know what I am doing….what’s best for me.”

In AA, we share our courage, strength and hope with each other with the idea that a person who is struggling with addiction can see something different from the hell they are living in. For 2020, I want to focus on courage, strength and hope. I got a jump start in late 2019 with the courage to say “I need to move on to protect my sobriety and my sanity.” I am finding strength to return to school for the 4th time to complete the goal I really wanted to achieve when I was 17 years old – being an RN. I have spent the last five years of my career, spreading hope wherever I could. I talked about hope to my clients in the jail. I spoke about hope to a person coming to me for money for residential services. I impressed hope upon those who were about to give up and give in. What I lost in 2019 was the feeling of hope for myself. I want my hope back. I can feel hope returning. I am willing to take these huge leaps of faith now because I have hope that is it all going to work out for the best.
Happy New Years Everyone!  

What a process this has been! The few days before Thanksgiving, I resigned my position with 7 weeks of notice. For the week following, I was going back and forth about the decision I had made. I found myself 2 hours late for work on the first day back after the weekend. That is not me. However, it has been me for at least 3 years now at my job. I felt huge anxiety about facing all of my co-workers since the news was out and announced. I wondered what I would say when the inevitable question would come about: “What are you going to do?” I’m not sure what I am going to say. I am not sure what I am going to do. Holy crap, did I just screw everything up by quitting my job????
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Today, two weeks later, I am OK. Better than OK, actually, I am relaxed, smiling for no reason and feeling like something huge is happening. Something big is happening and I am excited to share what this all looks like now. So the answer to the question, “what are you going to do?” has become pretty simple to answer. One of the very first things I learned in nursing school: I don’t know everything AND that is OK. So, when people ask, the answer is “I don’t exactly know.” I took a huge leap of faith that I could make a big change in my life. I wasn’t excited about anything. I wasn’t even excited about putting in my notice. Yet, as the reality of my choice is starting to sink in, I am excited. Last week, I was up before my alarm and at work 15 minutes early. It was one of the first time I felt well rested for more than a year. I didn’t consume 1900 calories of food after stepping in the door at night. I didn’t worry about feeling overwhelmed.

During the past two weeks, I attended a scrapbook weekend after Thanksgiving . I had a great time and I was present. I was laughing authentically. I wasn’t worried about work. I talked about so many other things besides works. It was liberating. The co-worker and friend that I go with for this annual weekend even said to me that she is looking forward to talking with me about my life outside of work. First entry on the checklist? Get a life outside of work. That is going to be a process, however, a process that I am actually looking forward to now. For the first time in 5 months, I did some crafts at home and enjoyed myself. For the first time in about a year, I just went out and did nothing. I was enjoying being out. I wasn’t just laying in bed waiting for motivation to come back. I didn’t dread my first day back to work after the weekend. I made the right decision and I think people are able to see it on my face and in my actions.
So, what am I going to do? I have been wildly productive over the past few weeks. In a previous blog, I referenced the year 2012 as one of my most successful and happy years of sobriety. I am really hopeful that 2020 might top 2012. If not, the hope is enough to keep me motivated to make it through all of the changes. I obtained a part-time job at a treatment center (16 hours a week). I have enrolled back in school to complete my RN. I crushed the entrance exam and found that about a year from now, I can be done with the LPN to RN bridge program. I met with the entrance counselor, she saved me a spot, enrolled me in all online classes (generals) for this first quarter so that I can finish up with my current job and get a handle on my job situation. It will only take 2 quarters to knock out my generals and in the spring of 2020, I will start the nursing courses and in the summer, I will be all nursing courses and done in winter quarter.
I also interviewed with a pediatric home care nursing agency today. They had a very interesting/great offer for me. I will sit on this as she is checking my references, etc., to see if this also might be a good opportunity for me to get back into skilled nursing. My skills are a little rusty! I will wait to hear from them and see how things play out. I am not desperate to take on more work. I have income through the end of March with what I have going already. Transplant will always take me whenever I want to work so finances are fine ongoing. I found insurance on the exchanges so I am covered. All the major barriers to quitting my job are taken care of. It’s weird, I am not worried. This is one of those “Higher Power” moments. I feel calm and excited about the path that is laid out in front of me.

In preparation of going back to school and working as an LPN for now, I completed a re-certification for my CPR. My class consisted of nurses and nurses that were going back to school. I felt at home. I didn’t feel out of place doing the simulations. My partner and I were talking shop about transplant and the differences between the U of Minnesota and Hennepin County. I was on this weird cloud 9 walking out of there. I felt like I was at home. I, then, went uniform shopping today. As lame as it sounds, I felt like a kid in a candy store. All the colors, the prints, the shoes, the stethoscopes and the SOCKS! I had to limit myself some. I was thinking I had spent the last 5 years building a professional wardrobe and now I have no scrubs to wear! Ha! I will build again.

With many situations we experience in our lives, it is hard to see the reality of the situation until we can get some distance from it. I know that I have been unhappy for the past couple of years. I was told about 3,000 times over the past 3 years to work on my self-care because I look stressed out. The more stressed out I became, the more I was blamed for my own struggles. I really did believe that there was something intrinsically wrong with me. One of the skills I learned in DBT that pretty much saved me from myself was “don’t should on yourself.” I should be this, I should be doing that, I should be able to handle this, I should, I should, I should. I still cringe when I hear that word because it can be very loaded with shame and judgement. The fact of the matter is, whether or not I should be able to handle things better, I am clearly not handling my job stress well. I tried the self-care (craft retreats, bathes, presents for myself, being with my family, being with friends) and it did not work. I was drained beyond what these activities could replenish.

In the world of AA, there is a saying, “If nothing changes, then nothing changes.” Pretty simple, right? I tried to make some personal changes to support the struggles that the career of substance abuse counseling brought into my life. I tried to push through the feelings I was experiencing and ended up shaming myself for not being “stronger” or “better than this”. I have been working for months toward the biggest and probably only change that I really make to save myself which was to leave my job and the career for now. There are valuable things I learned from this experience. Most importantly, though, I learned that there is nothing wrong with me. My job was too stressful for me and that’s OK. My job was consuming my life outside the walls where I work and that’s not OK. I felt defeated, unhelpful and exhausted nearly daily for at least 18 months, if not longer, and that’s not OK. The demands exceeded my abilities which does not translate into me being an outright failure.

The way I experience depression is multifaceted: I sleep A LOT (15+ hours a day), I have no motivation, there is very little good in anything, I experience a lot of negative messaging, I get stuck in all or nothing thinking patterns and I become excessively avoidant and defensive. As I look back at the last year, all of these symptoms were in force nearly every day. I would arouse some excitement in some things; however, I found myself being so short-tempered and irritable. I spent many years of these symptoms while I was drinking. I fought so hard to rebuild my life in sobriety. In the past year, I feel like I was backsliding into that life again. I certainly didn’t miss it. I don’t want to be that person anymore. I found myself dreaming about using alcohol at least weekly. Those dreams are so vivid that I feel like I am using when I wake up. Those dreams wreak my day. And while I am not drinking or using, I felt those triggers and feelings creeping back. In the past 6 months, I stopped taking care of my recovery. That was one of the major turning points for me. If I do not have my recovery, I literally have nothing else. I cannot function. If I lose that, I very well may lose my life. That is not an exaggeration. I was so far advanced in my addiction that I skirted death a few times. My odds to survive a relapse is minimal which is why I work so hard to stay and be in recovery. There is such amazing joy in my life and when addiction is active (even without using), I lose touch with that.

So, two weeks after putting in my notice, I feel alive again. I feel like I am in touch with my calling again. School was not my first choice when I was thinking about what change to make. Yet, I was lead to a program that fits with my desires not to be in school for another 4 years. I can accomplish yet another goal of mine – be a RN. Most importantly, I got back in contact with my recovery. I found a Recovery Church in Richfield that I am going to check out. My Higher Power has been extremely active keeping me away from temptations. I would like to find that outlet to continue my spiritual recovery as well.
Thanks for all the support, my dear readers, in this change. I haven’t been the biggest ball of joy for the past many months. Yet, you have all offered your support and encouragement. Grateful for you all!
 
Julie