Love Poems to the Dictionary

I’ve been reading over my past blog posts (all 100+ of them) and what can I say? I was a twenty-something in love with my thoughts.

Now I’ve reached the ripe age of 33 and I’m wise. I know everything now. It’s great; you should try it. I’ve even learned to use the semicolon; it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Nearly ten years later and I still overuse the comma. I’m addicted to lists, using two words when one would do, and hiding behind vocabulary. The only thing I’ve become is meta and I’m pretty sure I was that way before.

Sigh.

You know what you do when you have thoughts you can’t escape from? You write them down so they can really haunt you forever.

In conclusion, I’m not sure writing is a healthy habit.

Respect, Silence, and Malpractice

So much has changed. Here is a list:

• in nursing school
• studying nursing
• learning about nursing
• no time for things that are not nursing
• brain only thinks nurse
• i do not exist, there is only the NCLEX

I’ll spend the next 9 months as I’ve spent the last 6: answering this question.

And now for some thoughts on malpractice.

The path that leads to the dehumanizing of patients is wide and anyone can take the slow slide down into mindless, vacuous engrossment, and become acquainted with its close cousin, malpractice.

Mistreatment of the ill and dependent is a natural consequence of the fear or avoidance of feeling. In an effort to feel nothing at all, the outside world and everyone in it are relegated to the edges of a wide radius inside which there is no stimulus to emotion, and there is no one but the self. This is why it’s difficult to be around people who talk too much. In efforts to push away their own feelings, they fill the silence. Being pushed away with incessant speaking is lonely. It is not possible to be helped by someone who is like this. They are not aware of you. They are aware of their representation of you, which is designed to meet their needs. As a result, they engage in coercive actions toward those in their care because reality is warped.

On the other side of the continuum, being around people who are aware of others, thoughtful, and receptive, feels good. People who feel are able to empathize and think about emotions. Silence is an indispensable resource for the sensitive, rather than a threatening space where feelings can escape and become a threat. The participation of others is essential for the sensitive.

Courageous and self-possessed clinicians are also empathetic people and are able to advocate for their patients in ways that cowards simply cannot. Healthcare professionals who end up assaulting or battering patients do so as a result of their own personal childishness, all the while thinking the patient is the childish one. Listening to others and providing silence which they can fill is a matter of personal humility and a discipline abandoned by many for its lack of immediate reward.

I learned by being profoundly depressed that not only is being numb a form of self-absorption, it is also a form of self-protection that is tragically more personally wounding than any feared feeling could ever be.

In other news, did you guys know that the oxford comma is now endorsed by electronic writing aids like Microsoft word and Grammarly? My middle school language arts teacher, Ms. Caylor would be absolutely enraged. Please respect my privacy during this challenging time as I adjust to this difficult change in punctuation usage, comma frequency, and list organization. That is all.