This week has been an adventure.  Not the kind I’d choose to go on, but one I’m grateful for.  I’ve struggled to take the emotion out of this story because it’s about so much more than that.  I’ve always been highly sensitive, for good and bad.  It’s allowed me incredible intuition about people as well as great empathy toward people.  It has also wreaked havoc on me mentally and physically.  I don’t think I ever realized the extent of the damage caused by emotional trauma, both sustained and incidental.  So many of us, especially people pleasers, operate under the guise that we can handle it all.  We’ve had to do it all on our before, we will continue to do so. 

Dealing with issues at work, it’s always something on my mind.  There is always something going on, even if it has nothing to do with work in the moment, that brings me right back to work in my mind.  Things haven’t been going the greatest for a while and I’ve been trying to make the best of it for as long as I could but the weight has been becoming increasingly difficult.  For those in the industry, healthcare has become a different kind of burden over the last few years.  One that relies more heavily than ever on the graces of other people getting the job done to bring in money. 

I haven’t been thrilled at the prospect of this field for a while and, as we go back and forth and the uncertainty lingers over our position/status/role two years after a merger complied with ever increasing responsibilities and pressures, I’ve felt the end coming for a while.  Whether the end of my career or the end of my rope, is yet to be determined.  But I felt closer to knowing that this week and unfortunately that was not the better end for me.  It started with stress during the day, then escalated to pressure dreams, then panic dreams.  Finally there were no dreams because I was just up.  Being away at 3am waiting for an answer as the same thoughts raced cyclically through my brain made me feel sick and left me exhausted and with less clarity than before. 

We talked earlier about the signs repeating until you receive or understand the lesson.  Sometimes when we don’t understand the sign initially the universe begins to get louder and louder.  I think the saying is something like it starts with a whisper but will end with a 2×4 up your head if you don’t listen.  The ante has been upped progressively over the last year interspersed with false hope that things will change or that we will at least get answers.  There comes a time when you have to accept the inevitable, the reality of the situation.  Some places are just not for you.  They say that the first thing you think of in the morning is either your greatest pleasure or your greatest stressor.  If you don’t know the answer to that—or if you know it all too clearly, it’s time to have a deep chat with yourself.