Mulling of the mind

Job hunting; it begins.

The same questions never cease to stump me. Why here? Why you? Why are you so interesting that we'd drop our pants in public to have you work for us?

I wish they'd really ask me that last question.

I'm not special, that's my problem. They have no reason to want to hire me, and I have no real desire to work for them, it's simply a matter of me being sufficient to fulfill their needs at the lowest possible cost to them, and the highest possible rate for me.

It feels like such an asinine position to be in.

On the positive side of everything, I've made a new friend and I'm seeing an old friend today.

On the negative, the new friend is an old friend of the boyfriend of an ex-friend (odd title, eh), I am completely unable to take on tafe at the same time as university this semester, and I'm back to applying for jobs at Macca's. Go team.

I suppose it's not all bad. I'm kind of resigned to the idea of having to stay at home longer than I'd hoped; not taking on tafe means I won't have to worry about conflicting placement schedules and I can keep my focus on my nursing studies; I'm still in the middle of applying to volunteer for the Red Cross ... and I don't have cancer. That's a definite plus.

I had forgotten how poorly I deal with holidays. It took me like 3 or 4 days to get over the post-exam stupor, but now that I have ... well, one day free to myself and the unit is clean and my bedroom is back to its a-type organisation. I actually recommenced writing up my notes last night because I had nothing better to do (granted, my brother was hogging the internet and tv at the same time). Yeah, post-exam study.

Boo-yah.

I can finish my allocations next week, so hopefully they'll start releasing information and whatnot soonly so I can start organising my stuff for next semester.

God. How I'm going to survive post-university is beyond me.

Holidayyys :D

Freedom.

It is mine for a month.

Now to determine what to do with it...

Team Poor

My head is pounding.

My stomach is churning.

My mind is spinning and my body is aching from the tensed muscles.

Welcome back, Señor Stress. You have not been missed.

My exam is on Saturday. I figured out that to have covered everything in time, I'd have to be covering at least 3 body systems a day, when I'm averaging at like 1.3. So, yes, and now I'm wasting further time by doing this to let off some steam. Go team.

Well, I realised that I was wrong about the fee for the tafe course. It's a long story, but in essence I'd have to pay over $1000. So there goes that idea. But, it's okay. Now I don't have to worry as much about finding the money for my uniform, fun little nursey tools, my first aid certificate, rent, food.... and so on.

So we pick ourselves up, we dust ourselves off, we convince ourselves we don't care anyway, and we go on.

Oh, it also turns out that I've managed to add dysthymia to my collection of diagnoses. Again: Go team. The doctor wants me back on my meds, but I can't afford them. I forget how much it is, but at 2 tablets a day, they go pretty fast. I already can't afford to do anything, without trying to accommodate for filling prescriptions every other time I get paid.

I'm actually mildly surprised that he didn't force a referral on me like he did a couple of months ago. Not that I actually wound up seeing that psychologist, but that's neither here nor there.

Bleh I'm all whiney today, it's annoying me. So anyway, back to my discovery of the workings of the pancreas and marveling at histological pictures of chondrocytes. Oh hells yeah..

Shattered.

clashclash

Flashbacks will destroy me.

The reality of it all is still beyond me. That I went through that. That I'm still going through that. That it will never leave me. Ever.

It's a difficult concept to grasp, but more difficult to live.

I have been finding myself talking about it, so close to openly, and it's terrifying. I haven't talked to anyone about it since my last psychologist. The hardest thing is that I can still not openly admit to it. I dance around saying it, in every conversation, regardless of whether I'm talking about it as a general issue or as a personal experience.

How can I openly confess to it when I cannot admit it to myself?

Sometimes I think that perhaps I should open up, own it. It's not something I'm ashamed of, nor something I'm proud of. It isn't so much actually expressing it, as it is the stigma, the reaction, the permanence of the label, that I am afraid of. And I know that I shouldn't be, I shouldn't have to be afraid to say it out loud.

The other issue is the physical repercussions. The watching. The monitoring. The questions. The eyes. The immense sadness in my mother's eyes is an image I am still unable to forget, and I never want to be the cause of that look again.

Tonight... I tried. I had to. But then I went too far, and the same anxieties are engulfing me, tearing me apart on a microscopic level.

They told me to work past these, but how is that even possible? How can you possibly 'just say no' when every fibre of your being is screaming at you to do something? Or not do something.

Today, I remembered something. I remembered the passion I once had. I remembered my old dream of becoming the leading paediatrician and eradicating the measles and malaria completely; of reducing the amount of childhood deaths relating to diarrheal and respiratory infections; of introducing childhood immunisation to all countries in the world; of somehow feeding the world to reduce drug use, malnutrition and all of its inherent complications; of saving the fucking world.

God... I don't half dream big. But then, where would the world be if it weren't for those with big dreams and high ambitions?

I watched a movie tonight on SBS called Grbavica. I didn't actually realise until I looked it up that it was set in modern-day Bosnia, I kind of thought it was Serbia... because my geography is clearly lacking. The point being, it was ..amazing. I don't want to write a synopsis, but it is an incredible portrayal of humanity surviving things as devastating as the Balkan War (I think?). My brother even liked it, and he normally just sits there complaining about historical inaccuracies.

Hmm but anyway, I hear that the Red Cross has been calling people that I listed as referees when I applied a while ago to volunteer for them. I didn't actually realise that they were still interested in taking me on as a volunteer, but I guess if they like what my mother and a friend had to say about me, I'll find out what they have in store for me. I'm pretty keen to do some volunteer work, so it's actually pretty fantastic that they're doing a reference check for me now. There are a lot of organisations I'd love to volunteer for, especially the Starlight Foundation, but the Red Cross is still an amazing opportunity, so fingers crossed.

I think I will have to call the tafe tomorrow to see what's what in regards to the aged care/community health care certificate course. I'd really rather do that this coming semester, rather than first semester next year, though I probably should've done it either this time last year or earlier this year, since there is now the potential for the aged care placement to clash with my nursing exams or placement. I dislike clashes. Exponentially.

I think I'll shut up now. I'm fairly sure I ran out of interesting things to mull over in this blog about ten minutes ago..

Insufferable Ignorance

People ... mystify me.

It's like everyone's playing a game of whose-life-sucks-worse all the time, and they can't accept that maybe, just maybe, someone out there is actually suffering more than them -- or at all.

I'm not pretending to be innocent of this. I know that I am self-involved more often that not. But at least I am able to acknowledge that, hey, that guy has it worse than me, and something should be done about it. I don't try to demean him, or belittle his suffering. And I certainly don't tell him to 'just get the fuck over it'.

I swear to god, if I hear that phrase again, someone is going to lose their head. Literally.

I'm tired of the labels. Everyone is this or that according to someone, regardless of whether they've even met. Thin girls are anorexic. Women in their 40s are hacks. Elderly people are incontinent, hearing-impaired, they have dementia. Asians and Muslims are apparently the root of all evil.

Xenophobia can kiss my ass.

There is a group on facebook now called 'YOUR religion is ruining OUR planet'. Isn't it a little fucking stupid, to say the least, to blame *all* religion for everything going wrong in the world? I'm fairly sure that the Muslims didn't cause global warming. And Christian fundamentalists didn't make the volcano erupt in Iceland. Buddhists didn't create the hole in the ozone layer, and Pagans don't 'bewitch' the Japanese to go whaling.

What's so wrong with believing in something, anyway? Ja, I get that extremists do some pretty fucked up things, but aren't they ultimately a minority?

To blame everything on the extremists, to claim that an entire religion is comprised solely of extremists -- isn't that a little like tasting chocolate icecream and then declaring that all icecream is chocolate flavoured? Such a bad analogy, but it works. Have you *been* to Baskin & Robbins?

Ugh I'm not even going to touch on the sheer ignorance of mental health tonight.

Vent over for now.

And time for sleep and beautiful dreams of biological terms and diagrams.

Sweet dreams!

Un nuovo inizio o vecchio?

Well I deleted all of my old posts ... I'm not entirely sure why, though maybe it's because I just wanted to start again with a blog. I have another one that I'm still using, but that's a different ... version.

I still can't seem to shake the insomnia. I kind of prefer to think of it as my being perfectly attuned to some other part of the world. I have no idea which part, but ..somewhere.

I can't believe that I've almost finished my first semester of nursing. It seems strange, being at this stage, and looking through my notes and being able to pinpoint the exact stage at which I gave up last year. I would like to think I was forced to give up, but it really was my fault alone, and I refuse to 'blame it all on the mental illness'.

That's such a crock.

Though speaking of all that, I haven't heard from Corey in ages. I'm absurdly worried.

I heard through the grapevine that a girl I know from high school is taking up nursing with the idea of becoming a mental health nurse. Damn, that sounds so cool in theory. I just hope she turns out nothing like the nurses I knew. I hope she can make a difference.

It's impossible to describe the momentum of the flood of memories that engulfed me when I read those words.

The nurses.

The NGT.

The bolusing.

The piano.

The ECGs ... the occasion when another patient walked in & the nurse spacked off at him.

Cate; Lissa; Corey; Mason; Belinda.

Vicky, behind the laundry bins. Vicky, emerging from the bathrooms. Vicky, lurking in the shadows of the hall. Vicky with that absurd Tigger toy, covered in bandages. Vicky, and the chess pieces....Vicky.

It's a strangely hollowing thing to have to genuinely hope that such a close friend is still alive.

I still kick myself every day for not having gotten her mobile number or email address. I can't even remember her fucking last name.

On a slightly less sombre note, though, I have officially commenced study for the end-of-semester biology exam. It feels good to be getting my notes and thoughts organised into a logical pattern, in a good sized note book, with oodles of highlighters scattered over the surface of my desk.

Oh. Yeah. Mother & I went shopping today. She bought me a 24-pack of highlighters for $2.49 and a retractable one for .49c. Yah. Then I bought the groceries for $100.

Equality; I love it.

I've applied to do a Cert-III in aged care at Tafe this upcoming semester; I'm just waiting for them to call me back about it. I realise I must be insane to be voluntarily planning to undertake study at Tafe at the same time as university, but, really, there's only so much of this applying for jobs that I don't actually want in the first place and then being rejected by them bullshit dance that I can take. I'd rather do two courses simultaneously, stress myself out completely for a semester, with an end result of improved chances of being hired, and at a place I would actually want to work. There are a heap of advertisements all the time for AINs and EENs, so it'd be worth it. It's really just a matter of whether I can afford it.

I wish I had something intelligent to say, rather than just whining about every triviality that is bothering me this exact minute. But I don't, not really.

I only have this to say: I wish that people would stop promising to 'always be there'. No one can honour that promise.

It takes one miniscule, seemingly irrelevant, detail, and you've vanished.

Always there, huh?

Yah? So where are you now? Screw that, where were you a week ago, a month ago?

Where the fuck are you?