International Women’s Day: I’m Finally Getting It.

#IWD feels different this year. It has evolved, almost unrecognizably to me due to my own life situations and to the current changes in our culture. I never even used to know it existed, one, because social media helps spread the word and two, because years ago I could never get out of my own head enough to care. However, with new life experiences and recognitions, including marriage to my life partner, a pregnancy in my 35th year, previous dating and travel, and so much related to being and becoming a nurse, I appreciate women more than ever. 

It took me several years of nursing and a burnout or two to realize much of what drove me to nursing was my inherent love of caring for others that I thought was a God given talent at the time. But after lots of therapy and self-reflection, I realized my “innate” ability to care for others was a series of habits I had developed throughout my childhood and when I was a young adult. As a typical, female, Midwestern child, my culture trained me to comply, trained me to be quiet, and trained me to manipulate the environment around me so that everyone would be happy at the expense of myself. Now granted, it goes much deeper than that, but the outcome of this behavior was tragic. 

My early 20s was a time of confusion and dullness. My self-assurance came from attracting the male species and controlling my weight in various destructive ways. I had zero self-confidence, zero plan, zero motivation to awaken in the morning and zero sense of self. So, I married the first man who made me feel like “something” because that’s just what you did and the relationship robbed me of every truth I ever knew. So after 9 years in that relationship and in my darkest hours, I crawled my way out. 

Naive to the world around me and shook by my experiences, it was my nurse friends who resurrected me. And through countless hours of nightshift conversations, it was them that made me feel normal and made me realize that my various forms of damage led me to the present day. Ninety-nine percent of them were female. 

The conversations surrounding the fall of my relationship would transition to the fall of their relationships, which always included physical, sexual, and emotional abuse to an extreme far worse than I had ever experienced. It was all of us. Every single one of us had been abused, manipulated, controlled, and at one point or another, our bodies had been used by men. I began to hate men - a bias I am still overcoming to this day, but I began to realize the power, resilience, strength, and tenacity of women for the first time in my life. 

Was this a woman thing? Or was it a nurse thing? I always wondered. Part of me knows it’s both, but is likely more prevalent in nurses. Prior to meeting my current husband and forever soulmate, I was continuously lied to, manipulated, and morally injured by men in ways not worth mentioning in this post. But the point being, therapy helped me through this. Therapy helped me garner a fulfilling relationship with my work; one that meant I wasn’t pouring from an empty cup and simultaneously using the praise of being a nurse to fill my eternal emptiness. Therapy also helped me with relationships, learning anew the difference between right and wrong and how to set boundaries to maintain my fragile sense of self.

So, years later, in a culture learning from the blatant reveal of racism and abuse in our society, it is becoming even more obvious to me, how purely extraordinary women are. And despite our idiosyncrasies and the oppression in which we work, I will always recognize how extraordinary women in nursing are particularly, but also women in healthcare, women overall, and absolutely, certainly and mostly - women of color. 

I strive for my journey of women’s appreciation to continue learning about women of color especially, women who have made great accomplishments in male dominated environments, women who contently run nuances of the every day, and finally and maybe even the most important, the men who understand us, support us, and practice as our allies. 

Happy International Women’s Day to you all - you deserve more recognition than you think.