The Rest of the Story

I never used to hate my job. Sure, there were days that I didn’t really want to go in to work; days where I was tired or frustrated or just had something else going on. But overall I loved being able to help people, whether that meant helping them to get better, or helping them to pass on with dignity. Being a nurse was a large part of my personal identity. It wasn’t just what I did for a living, it was who I was—just like how I was a huge Harry Potter nerd and a chocoholic and a lover of animals—I was a nurse. 

Let’s back up a bit…

It was the summer of 2016, and life was good. I had just landed my dream job in ICU. My husband had also gotten a new job in the spring that let him work from home but also offered lots of opportunity for travel. And, to top it all off, I was in the best shape of my life thanks to a year’s worth of tracking what I ate and exercising regularly.

And then things started to fall apart.

It’s hard to put a finger on how exactly it started. It’s a classic chicken-or-egg scenario: Did I become depressed because I began to dislike my job, or did I come to dislike my job because I was depressed? There certainly were triggers on either end. I was lonely; I missed the friends I’d seen almost every day on my my old unit, and I was finding it difficult to forge such relationships in my new job. I was struggling to control my weight, which had begun to creep up again; my new shift rotation made it impossible to have a regular exercise schedule, and there was a steady supply of treats at work in which to indulge. And I was beginning to feel that I wasn’t actually helping my patients anymore; instead of being on a clearly defined path towards either recovery or palliation many of them languished in a torturous sort of no-man’s land, their condition declining despite all the interventions we tried, but with the family (and sometimes the doctors) unwilling to accept death as an option we pushed on, sometimes succeeding in holding off the final end, but with horrible costs to patients’ mental and physical health.

Did I become depressed because I began to dislike my job, or did I come to dislike my job because I was depressed?

. . .

Whatever the root cause, I came to rely on travel to rescue me from the way my job made me feel.

Whatever the root cause, the outcome was a horrible cycle of dreading work, hating myself for it, forcing myself to go to work, and dreading it more as a result. An insidious inner voice began to whisper, then shout, that I was a Bad Person—and try as I might, I couldn’t block it out. The thought of going in to work, and then the thought of doing anything (going to the gym, getting groceries, picking out clothes for the day, getting out of bed) filled me with a mixture of anxiety and hopelessness so potent that I would break down into tears.

I came to rely on travel to rescue me from the way my job made me feel. Somehow, although attempting to run errands regularly caused me to have anxiety attacks, travel was freeing. True, I still had bad moments abroad when things didn’t go according to plan—like during our second trip to Japan when we walked several kilometres from the train station to a hotel only to realize it was the wrong one—but by and large I was much happier travelling, because I didn’t have to endure the crushing weight of dread re: work. At least, not until we got back home and the feeling inevitably returned, usually worse than ever. I started to wish not only that I could quit my job, but that I could quit living. I fantasized about committing suicide on a regular basis, and felt even more self-loathing as a result, both for considering it (what about the pain I would cause my family?! what about the PTSD I could cause witnesses and first responders?!), and for not following through.

I hid the true depths of my unhappiness from almost everyone; from my coworkers, from my friends, from my family. I downplayed the situation to my doctor because I was terrified to go on medication, and although I did agree to see a counsellor, I stopped going when my anxiety got so bad that I started having panic attacks leading up to my appointments.

The only person who knew the whole of what I was going through was my husband. And he was terrified. I regularly told him how much I wished he didn’t love me so that I could die without guilt. I endlessly expounded on my flaws, trying to force him to hate me as much as I hated myself, to convince him to leave me so that I could leave, too. Cam tried pull me out of the twin grips of my crippling anxiety & depression, to hold me when I hid under the covers and to gainsay the insults I heaped on myself, but the strain of keeping my secret was wearing on him, and in December of 2018 he rounded off Christmas dinner with an impassioned denouncement of my entire family for failing to care about me enough to notice my struggles. (Of course, they cared deeply and the only reason they hadn’t known is that I’d hidden it from them, but at this point Cam wasn’t thinking straight because of his fear for my life.)

There were tears, and declarations of love, and pleas for me to seek help. And I did try, but once again I found reasons not to proceed, from doubting the efficacy of the “certified counsellors” available for free through my work benefits, to feeling that I wasn’t worth the money it would cost to see a “real” clinical psychologist. I continued to flounder, the months blurring together, still forcing myself to go into work, now viewing it as a way to punish myself for my many failings. When the end of summer rolled around and my registration as a RN was up for renewal, I strongly considered just letting it lapse. But, lacking any ideas for alternate employment, I went through with the renewal.

I did, at last, fess up to my doctor during my annual appointment in the fall, and agreed to try antidepressants. But medications that alter your brain chemistry take a while to work, and just over a month later, I was still struggling off and on. One December morning, instead of telling Cam “I love you too” as I left for work, I told him “I wish I wasn’t alive”.

It wasn’t the first time I had said it. But it was the first time I’d left it hanging in the air between us without a backwards glance, and it shook me enough to galvanize me into action, and to ask for help. I went to an emergency mental health clinic that provided me with the resources I needed to find a psychologist whose treatment style worked for me. And although my progress was slow at first, between the antidepressants and therapy, things were finally starting to look a little better. As we rang in the new year, 2020 looked promising. My mental health was on an upswing after more than two years of being deeply mired in depression. I had managed to set aside several dates in my mess of a schedule to hang out with friends both old and (gasp!) new. And Cam and I had a year chock full of travel to look forward to: camping, ski trips, working holidays in Europe, and (the icing on the cake) a three-week trip to Ecuador that spring, including two weeks touring the Galapagos islands.

As we rang in the new year, 2020 looked promising.

When COVID first appeared on the horizon that spring, I foolishly didn’t think that it would affect us much. Sure, my parents’ trip to Italy was on the rocks, but they were drowning in cases, whereas the entire country of Ecuador had only four (all of which were in a city that we weren’t going to be visiting). Our tour company was sending regular updates, emphasizing each and every time how safe small-group travel was, how much the local businesses relied on tourism, and that they were sure that the trip would be going ahead. The morning of our departure, I performed my daily check of the Government of Canada’s travel website, and verified that they were still only cautioning against travel on cruise ships, and to specific countries such as China. We boarded our flight that afternoon, and arrived in Quito around 4:30am. After a few hours’ sleep, we set out to explore the city, and shared a laugh at the hawker stalls selling hand sanitizer and toilet paper. As the evening crept closer, however, the mood started to change. Texts from our families back home started to roll in, relaying the breaking news that a global travel advisory had been announced, and that citizens abroad were being advised to return ASAP. With an acute sense of unease, we attended our “kick-off” meeting with our tour group, only to be told by our guides that the Ecuadorian government had just announced that the country was to go into full lockdown, and that we had roughly 48 hours to leave the country before we would be stuck there indefinitely. 

The next two days are a blur in my memory, but certain things stand out. I remember trying in vain to contact our airline to change our return flights. I remember that every booking website we went on crashed. I remember sobbing at the airport ticketing counter because they had so many people on standby that they couldn’t add us to the list. I remember calling the Canadians Stranded Abroad SOS line and being advised to take a bus to neighbouring Colombia to catch a flight there (despite the fact that Canadian citizens are advised to “avoid all travel” within 50km of the Colombian border due to the risk of kidnapping and violent crime), or else to “make the best” of the situation and consider it an “extended vacation”. And I remember finally managing to book a flight out with less than 20 hours to go, and passing out from exhaustion shortly after.

Once we were back home, the two-week quarantine period and first lockdown passed without issue. Of course I could give up things like going out to dinner at restaurants if it meant that I would be keeping others safe. “My husband and I are practically hermits anyways,” I would chirp, when asked how I was coping. “This isn’t all that different from our normal day-to-day life!” But there were two major issues with this statement, which I was doing my utmost to push to the back of my mind. The first was that I had been trying desperately to change that hermitic life in order to stave off the loneliness that was feeding into my depression. And the second was that I relied on the transformative power of travel to rescue me from the dementor-esque happiness-sucking soul-destroying effects of my job. And as each wave of COVID crested and crashed down around me, as I watched with horror as many lost their lives and others lost their livelihoods, the loss that affected me the most was that of my peregrinating way of life.

As each wave of COVID crested and crashed around me, the loss that affected me the most was that of my peregrinating way of life.

. . .

I was no longer a nurse who travelled in her spare time; instead, I was a traveller who nursed in order to fund my trips.

My depression came back with a vengeance, fuelled not only by loneliness from isolation and stress from work, but by something even more incendiary: self-hatred. Who but a monster could watch people die nearly every day and still mourn a vacation? Who but a truly horrible person could hear about friends trying to scrape a living and still be upset about not being able to jet-set about? I told myself that I had no right to be sad when I had lost so little in comparison, but no matter how much I tried to drown my feelings of deprivation, they kept bobbing back up to the surface like so much repugnant flotsam & jetsam.

When I confessed my latest struggles in therapy—all the dashed hopes, all the anger and resentment, all the despair—my psychologist identified what I was experiencing as the stages of grief. It took several more sessions for her to get through to me that this did not make me a Bad Person, that suffering is not a contest and that I was entitled to grieve what COVID had stolen from me just as much as everyone else. She also helped me to realize why the loss of travel was affecting me so acutely. Over the years my personal identity had been undergoing a not-so-subtle shift. I was no longer a nurse who travelled in her spare time. Instead, I was a traveller who nursed in order to fund my trips.

It took me a long time to acquiesce to this recasting, and even longer to internalize the assurances that it didn’t mean that I was a bad nurse. But sometime in the spring of 2021 it finally sunk in, and I began actively brainstorming ways to adapt my life to better fit my new self. At first, the idea of starting a travel blog seemed ridiculous, the reasons against it innumerable. But the seed wouldn’t die. I didn’t recognize what was keeping it alive at first, but it turns out that for the first time in a long time, I had hope.