What is below the basement?

People talk about hitting rock bottom, but what do you call it when you get lower than that?  {Don’t worry, I’m healthy, my family is health with the exception of the copious amounts of snot coming out of my child’s nose.}  I started this semester behind emotionally and mentally.  I just wasn’t ready for another semester after the brutal demands of the summer.  We are now a few weeks in and I still don’t feel like I’ve even hit baseline in the emotional stability department.

If I were to outline all of the things that have happened in and to my family since I started this program, you would offer to sign me up for wine of the month club.  It has been relentless and exhausting dealing with one situation after the next.  Adding this to the high demands of nursing school, maintaining a healthy relationship with my husband, raising my youngest to be a good man, and supporting my oldest as he finds his way in the world as a man, seems absolutely insurmountable.  The best way I can think to describe it is:

After all, it is scientific.  Our bodies can compensate for injury for so long before it gives up.  {Nursing 101. You’re welcome.}  Not only are our adrenals getting maxed out {to the point where no amount of magnesium lotion will help}, but our bodies and minds just get tired of fighting.

To help myself out and give my brain a break, I have made time for myself one night a week to get out of the house and be around people who love me and support me {and attempt to choke me or break my arms}.  I have lost the 10 pounds I gained over the summer by changing my eating habits and ensuring I’m getting in some sort of exercise at least a few times a week.  I get sleep.  Not always all that well, but I am in bed for at least 6-7 hours a night.  {Yes, I know it should be more, but we are here discussing nursing school so let’s be real with the expectations.} I have even adjusted the expectations I place on myself and I am accepting the fact that I may just barely scrape by this semester.  All in all, I’m doing all the things I can to take care of myself without taking time from some other piece of the to-do list pie chart.

I’m not trying to throw myself a pity part {although that does happen from time to time}, but more to tell others out there that it is possible to get through this, even when it feels like there is another tragedy hiding around every corner just waiting to suck the life out of you.  This is hard.  Much harder than I ever thought nursing school could ever be, but it will be so worth it.  To know that you made it through your entire program without going to prison for shanking someone for cutting in front of you in the coffee line will be your reward.  Well, that and a nursing license.

I say all of this to tell you, you can do it.  You will do it.  Keep putting one foot in front of the other and take everything one day at a time.  It feels like an eternity, but the end of the program will come and you will march your happy butt up in your sparkling white scrubs and get that pin attached to your chest with pride… even if it kills you.  {Just kidding.  There is no time for dying in nursing school.  That’s an unexcused absence.}

This is your permission to have a meltdown.  This is your permission to have yourself an epic pity party.  This is your permission to cry just because you are exhausted.  What you don’t have permission to do is give up.

Hear me when I say:

You {we} absolutely can do this.  

And you {we} will.

Just don't give up.