Wanderlust?

Warning: A lot of run-on sentences. :o

I simply have no feeling right now. I think I’m just stuck in this void, this space of nothing. There’s no motivation. There’s no creative idea. Heck, there isn’t even an idea. I sit here in boredom, wasting my evening. Wanting to sleep, yet unable to fall asleep. Wanting to work, yet unable to work.

I take out my laptop from my backpack that sits next to me on the cold elevator floor. I flip it open. Click open a textbook. Since I’m stuck here, I might as well study for my Pharmacology quiz on Thursday, right?

Wrong. The black lettering on white background swims before my eyes. I stare at it, unblinking. Soon enough, Baskerville font floats off the screen until I see the words “anti-cholinergic drugs” and “beta-2 adrenergic agonists” in my peripheral vision.

Blinking myself out of my stupor, I glance to the bottom right of the screen. 6:12 PM. Four minutes passed.

I yell out in frustration. What am I doing here? How did I even get stuck in here? I was just trying to get to my nice, albeit small apartment so that I can take a scalding hot shower to erase the day out of my mind. Should've taken the stairs.

I check my phone. Open Facebook Messenger to the text I sent to my best buddy from high school.

5:30 PM. “YEO. I’m STUCK IN MY APARTMENT ELEVATOR.” The little gray circle beneath the text is filled in. Just as I am about to click off my phone, I watch his profile picture fall to the bottom of the screen.

Seen. Maybe I’ll have some entertainment. The speech bubble with the dot, dot, dot pop up.

Boop.

“Lol… the whole city’s power is down”. I stare at the screen. I’m sure if someone could see me right now—which they definitely can’t because I’m stuck in this dumb elevator all by my lonesome—they’d see the letters “WTF” written in bright red ink across my forehead.

The dot, dot, dot continues.

“There was a storm. Ur prolly gonna be in there a while kid. hf” The dude inserts two laughing crying emojis. I roll my eyes. I’m going to kill him when I get out of here. Of course, he would laugh at me and do absolutely nothing to help me. That’s how you know you have great friends.

I send him the middle finger emoji and click off my phone. The floor is dirty as hell, which is why I, and my backpack, are sitting on two Daily News newspapers. I may be tired, but there’s no way I’m letting my ass touch the floor.

The elevator is dark. The lights shut out just as the elevator shuddered to a stop fifty minutes ago. At the moment, I thought the elevator was just going to drop down the whole eight stories, but the lights immediately blinked off and then the elevator shook around for a good three minutes.

I close the lid of my laptop. No point in wasting its power. The piece of trash can lose power faster than you can blink. One moment it’s 100%, full of vitality and life, the next moment it’s at 64% and making me panic because it’s getting too close to half-dead for comfort.

I bring my knees into my chest, wrap my arms around them, and close my eyes. I press my fingertips to my eyelids and think back to the question my nursing professor asked me earlier today. “Why do you want to become a nurse?” My mind was blank. Probably the single worse question anyone can ask me, besides “Are you free to meet up?”, asked by that weird guy on Instagram you’ve only ever talked to once in real life, but he somehow has fallen in love with you. You definitely don’t want to meet up. And I definitely don’t know how to answer that question.  

The typical answer flows out my mouth, “I want to help people and I like science.”

My professor nods. “I’ve heard a lot of students say that before,” she says. “But where’s the motivation behind that answer? The drive? The willpower to go forth and achieve what you’ve always dreamed of?”

Well, professor. I can answer that for you. Which I didn’t say in class because I value my life. The professor’s a fierce lady.

There’s no motivation. No drive. No dream. At least not a realistic one. For the vast majority, this doesn’t even exist. We just want to live comfortably, eat comfortably, and last but not least, amass great wealth. That’s probably the dream. Why do we choose to do the things that we do? It’s probably the lesser evil when compared to living on the streets as a foul-smelling homeless person in a cardboard box, whom everyone stays a 10-foot radius distance from and tries not to screw up their nose because the smell is just so putrid. I’d definitely rather be helping people than doing that.

But maybe the lack of a dream is too harsh a way to describe it. Why do we choose to do what we do? It could be because we just don’t suck at it as much as other things like, say, writing a book or becoming a singer-songwriter. Who doesn’t want to tell a story and have people vying to listen to it? The fact of the matter is, there are too many of those people in this sea of wannabes, and people just don’t give a shit about things that don’t directly concern them. The market is large. The market is hard. The market is ruthless.

No one wants to be a starving artist.

We won’t make the money we need to live that comfortable life, eat that comfortable food, and buy those material items. So, we do the next best thing. Maybe we choose something we might not hate that much, and in the meantime, we can still leave our effect upon humanity.

My head lolls forward into my waiting hands, arms resting on my knees that are now open into a man-spread. My dad would tell me to be more lady-like. My mom would cross her legs daintily in an effort to show what that meant. It’s fine. No one can see me anyway.

But nursing. Perhaps there is a dream. We help people because we care. We help people because we want them to feel cared. We help people to help ourselves achieve what we want. We are all selfish right? That is what humans were born to be. That is how we survive, and it is written into the nucleic acids and the hydrogen bonds of our DNA.

We do things we have to do, things we don’t particularly enjoy, even things we positively hate—as all my past co-workers can attest to—in order to do what we want to do. And the thing I want to do can be described with one noun.

Wanderlust. The itch to see the world. And the world has so much to offer, if given the chance, we’d be fools not to set out and begin to see it when we are young.

Nursing. Such a versatile field. Such a difficult field. Such a ruthless field. And yet, with it, it’s possible to fulfill the so-called “dream.” There’s the money, there’s the time, there’s the selfish selflessness that comes with that pain. The helping others to help yourself.

People say that those who love to help others are just as selfish as the next guy. The ability to lend a hand allows the helper a rush of dopamine, the “feel good” hormone. That’s right. It gives you a rush of happiness. Would nursing be like a rush of dopamine, a bunch of epinephrine (adrenaline), and a crap ton of oh-shit-my-patient’s-life-is-in-danger-and-I-need-to-figure-out-how-to-save-their-life hormone?

I don’t know. What else don’t I know?

Many things.

Will I be able to travel the seven seas and the seven continents, and explore every desert, mountain, and culture before I lay shivering and shriveled upon my death bed? Would it be possible to walk across this country? Will I be able to leave comfortably and eat comfortably and amass great wealth? Will I find my significant other? Will I have freedom to do what I want, when I want, however I want?

Freedom.

Maybe that’s the word for everything. Not wanderlust at all. I want the freedom to live how I want, to be able to make my own choices, to go anywhere my heart desires.

But with freedom, eventually comes failures. Professor, perhaps my spoken answer possessed neither drive nor motivation, but some things simply cannot be expressed. The obstacles we face, only we will know it’s true worth. The dreams we have, only we will know how badly we wish to realize them.

That unfeeling feeling seeps out from beneath my Converse shoes and trickles down my hair. I want to see everything and experience everything.

I’m not asking for the world to be at my fingertips. I’m asking to go to the world. I am determined to grab onto it and hug it until I lay shivering and shriveled upon my death bed.

I reach back into my backpack for my laptop, fingers rapidly hitting the keyboard to type in my password.

There’s a thump from outside the elevator doors.

“Miss! We’ve finally got the door open. You can come out now!” A man in a yellow shirt stands in front of me, holding a crowbar to the elevator door.

I shush him, eyes focused on the screen. “Be quiet! I’ll come out when I finish this section on bronchodilators.”

A/N:

I think nursing is a wonderful field to enter and the people in it are probably one of the greatest, strongest groups of people to walk upon this world. Their limits are tested every single day, with every single shift that they work. Thank you to all the healthcare workers for doing what you do, before, during, and after this global pandemic.