Wednesday, October 22, 2014

I Am a Success--Sometimes

Last week a close friend left our shared job to be a full-time EMT, tomorrow another will leave to join a clinical research team, and today a third returned from a leave of absence to announce that he will leave for an internship in two months. It's a pretty bitter pill to swallow, not only because we have a high intensity job made easier by both each others' competence and camaraderie, but also because great things are happening in their lives, while mine feels like it's at a standstill.

For the record, over the summer, my remaining two good work friends initiated a romantic relationship. So, here I am, working at the same place I was at two years ago, single, staring down the barrel of another year and a half of nursing school, and not feeling the forward momentum that seems to be gracing the lives of my friends. If I were the person I aspire to be, I'd see great inspiration in their hard work and great opportunities. But instead I'm the person I am, and I wonder why I bother buying into the routine at all, while great things happen around, but never to, me.

It's in these instances that I'm forced to remind myself that a negative attitude is self-perpetuating, that if I expect nothing to change, I won't do anything to propel myself toward it, and so a cycle of misery is initiated.

I am also the only person on earth who has achieved what I've achieved with the resources and hurdles I've had throughout my life--and my friends are similarly unique. I have some insight into the effort they put in to getting their opportunities and I can assure anyone who asks that what they've accomplished was hard-won. It's easy to feel unaccomplished next to them, especially in an industry where we get so few external tokens of achievement, but I'm not. I excel at lesson plans, I've taught kids to grow on academic and social levels, I'm a great baker, highly intelligent, creative, a good writer, I give good advice, and I can connect with troubled kids and relate to them on their level without being condescending, and I'm rocking my nursing pre-reqs. None of this is small or un-noteworthy. Sometimes I need to enumerate what I've already done in order to push myself to do more. In the words of Martha Jones, I am good.

It's so easy to feel unaccomplished in a society that accentuates the negative, so when something good happens to others, we almost automatically contrast their positive with our negatives, and we disregard the bigger picture. It's important to remember what we've achieved, but the most essential thing to remember is that it's not a competition. Good things happening to one of us don't take away from the rest, and we are interdependent creatures. We can choose to be a part of each others' successes, and we can draw inspiration from others to fuel our own. Support creates a success of all of us.

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