oceans

Lately, I've been really finding myself diving deeper into so many things I feel so strongly about and finding myself often overwhelmed at all the things I wish I could do.  Education, medicine, public health, mental health, international development, culture, the world--all the oceans I have fallen in love with and wish I could swim in only to realise that it is not humanly possible (or to some extent, healthy) to dive as deeply as I wish I could into each and every one of them.  

So, I am in a place where I am trying to figure out how I can best swim.  

To figure out what makes me so thirsty to go back to each and every one of those oceans; they have to got to have something in common.  Because this swimmer is occasionally frazzled and infatuated by the delusion that everything she encounters is a cross she is compelled to bear--oceans that are too large for her to ever swim alone in.  She needs to know she doesn't have to--do it alone, I mean.

post-overnight shift rant

I just got done with my shift and was walking to the bus stop only to see in the distance, an ambulance with flashing lights pulling into the bus stop.  My heart stops and my curiosity peaks.  In the distance, I also see two of my EMT colleagues sitting by a male, presumably the patient, and I go into slight EMT mode.  My eyes are locked with such intense curiosity but more so, an intense desire to intervene.  To be a part of what was going.  To see what I could do.  To help.

This job has pushed my buttons, spiked my fight and flight system without fail, disrupted my sleep cycle, forever changed my sensitivity to any beeping tone resembling the radio's, has me out of breath, running to a building up the stairs because my bike broke halfway there, and has my eyes eagerly pierced through the window panes of the bus as I get on in spite having endured a twenty-hour Friday night shift with a 3am call, still trying to figure out what was happening and if I should have stayed on and helped my EMT colleagues despite the end of my shift.  A slight frustration creeps for not being able to do anything.

And it is these extraordinary feelings and compulsions to be of any use for another human being in need of help, even just a little bit, that has me thinking of all of this as more than just a job.  

It makes me start every shift genuinely loving what I do.  And happy that I get to do what I love.

maybe, maybe this is a happy rant.

after

still processing

but

i feel

like i made a difference.

"It made a difference to that one."



and the work cannot be over