no more blueprints: an end-of-nursing-school post

Now that I am done with nursing school:

1. I can volunteer more -- with Health Homes, where I'm orienting today, with the Visiting Nurses Association (in October), with the long-term care peds unit, with the shelter moms

2. I can write in my blog without feeling like I should be working on a blueprint

3. I can go back and reread all the things I read, and cared about, back in Med-Surg I and II and III, before my spirit was kind of broken by nursing school and its crazy assortment of bullshit

4. I can work on my youth development program full time, my trip to m-effing LONDON and PARIS notwithstanding

5. I can focus on my child in such a way that, m-effing London trip aside, he will hopefully not hit age three with the suffocating sense that he is always on the edge of Total Abandonment that has been so central to my own growing up process,

6. I can return, hopefully in a someone less rapid-cycling-bipolar kind of way, to preoccupations like:

• the existence of God, and What That Might Mean for my life, 

• sexuality, and my feelings about the development and production of Sexy Dancing Shows   and also art, and the development and production of shows, period, 

• what it is, now, that I hope to do with my RN/multiple college degrees/ time/ ability/ life. Who needs help? What can I be giving? 

• whether or not there are things I can do that don't constitute direct responses to the needs of others, and that I can also feel good about doing? Can I just, like, make meatballs for my child? Go running? Write a story? Make art?

One of the tremendous new nurses I have the privileges of knowing, who is not a mom or a Christian or, as far as I can tell, anxiety-disordered, turned to me after a solid ten hours of mutually not mothering or serving others or studying, and said, "you're just Amanda right now!"

For me, sidestepping a categorical kind of identity has always plunged me headlong into the kind of dismissal of any self that I associate with religion, and with which I have had a pretty tortured relationship for the past three decades. 

I don't know what it means to be just Amanda, because basically, the moment after I stop defining myself in terms of my grades or my weight or my resume, I remember that God doesn't want me to think about myself at all, as anything; I should be thinking about others, or Jesus, or whatever. (This revelation never seems to show up on time to interrupt my self-flagellation over my many and varied failures of character). 

But here I am: done with nursing school and its structure and constant stream of negative feedback, so useful for keeping me in my place -- which sounds unhealthy and unpleasant unless one is familiar with the profound anxiety engendered by belonging no place and being no one -- and also no longer convinced, or even intent of convincing myself, of the kind of God who can provide me with "an identity in Christ".

It's not that I stopped believing in God over the course of the past year; I just don't think God exists to provide me with a comfortable, coherent sense of my identity, or my purpose, or the world in which I live. Whatever the hell God might be doing, I don't think He's doing it in an effort to provide me with a comfy, prefab worldview: You are X  should be doing Y and avoiding Z. 

I don't have to be, or do, anything; don't have to study for any more tests, and also don't have to wrestle my mind into the undersized jeans of literal interpretations of Genesis or contemporary faith-talk or the big-H History of rationalism and its claims to universality. In a literal, terrifying, unstable-feeling sense, I can do whatever I want. That awareness has been there for awhile, but my compulsion to get through nursing school has provided a sort of structure as my evolving faith kind of shape-shifted into something less reassuringly constrictive. 

Strangely, my belief -- in the old-school, extra-cognitive sense of the world -- is stronger than it's been since about 1990. It's just that the God I believe in, now, is of limited use in the making of day-to-day decisions and construction of comforting little totems: this matters, and this, but not this. My sense is that this is a better, richer, space in which to live. But moving into it now, when I'm also letting go of all the pet obsessions that have dominated the nursing school experience -- the checking of Prime and endless iterations of study guides and select-all-that-apply practice questions and (oh my God) the effing list serve -- it's overwhelming, too.