For the past few weeks, I’ve been driving to and from work without listening to anything. If I’m lucky, I get a sunset or sunrise view on the way home or on the way to work. But other than that, it’s just me, the car, and the road, driving at 80mph for 45 minutes without anything else to distract me.
I still have a hard time taking off my nursing hat when I clock out. I hear the beeping of vital signs machines, pulse ox machines, IV pumps and the ringing of call lights even when I sleep. I’ll question whether or not I did absolutely everything I could have done in my 12 hours of working for each and every one of my patients. Sometimes I’ll imagine the sound of the phone ringing or my handphone that I use for work ringing and that has jolted me up a couple of times at 4:30 in the morning even on my off days.
There’s so much I think about when I work, and even after that, it seems like my brain is still set on hyper-speed. And when I’m not thinking about work, there’s a bunch of other things that keep my mind in distress… pressure, unmet expectations, unforeseen events, letdowns and emptiness and so many other negative thoughts that are essentially endless. My future, my family… my career and where it’s supposed to go.. the people around me, the people I’ve drifted apart from, the fact that I don’t really have anyone who understands me and the fact that after 24 years of living I still expect to find someone who understands the weirdness that makes up me.
So for the 45 minutes I’m driving, I don’t think about anything else except about staying within the lines of my lane. Watching the lane marks blur into a single line can be a bit hypnotizing and the subtle turns of the freeway kind of rock me back and forth. It’s hard for me to not think or over-think. It’s ingrained into my psyche. But for some reason, driving to work has helped me to not think so hard.
You would think that quiet Sasha shouldn’t have so much quiet time 😛 But in those moments of quietness where I don’t have to think about all the things that bother me, it’s really just an escape from myself. I worry a lot and I think about so many things and so many people. I need a vacation lol. I need a social media cleanse or an electronics cleanse or whatever you call that 😛
Mmkay. I’ll stop this for now, I know it’s one of the phases I go through. But gosh darn it, when life is hard, it is really hard. Staying positive isn’t as easy as I try to make it seem. I’m just gonna channel Dori from Finding Nemo, (whom I closely relate to due to our very similar attention span and memory problems), and just keep swimmin’ 🙂