Bravery: To Start Again

I sit as an outsider, beside the humming throng.  I need to again prove my place, be relatable, be knowledgeable, be exceptionally kind.  I hide my extroversion behind a mask of insecurity and a fake smile.  I am interested, it is true, in the bodies around me.  What are their stories?  Who are their families?  Will I ever know the thoughts behind their eyes?

But, I sigh a heavy sigh and fold my arms across my chest.  I look down and look away.  I don’t have the energy to enter in.  To become known again feels miles away and I don’t know if my legs can carry me over the mountains in between there, and here. 

More than six times in less than 9 years I have entered new workplaces.  Each new hospital unit a foreign land.  The familiar shroud of not knowing hovers over me once more.  Like a shadow I cannot shake, is this identity of stranger.  I am again, unknown and unknowing.   I hang back, and observe.  I have done this too many times to be naïve and just enough times to know I don’t want to be here again. I hear communication pass over top of me like a fog and I am disoriented.  I am one step further on the outside this time, as a wall of language difference sits high between them and me.  I don’t know the jokes. I don’t know the hierarchy.  Do I puff up or lay down?  Humiliation is heavy on me as I admit confusion, lostness, and inadequacy.  Where is the bathroom?  What key is this for?  Who is that person?  I endure looking stupid, over and over again.

Shaky hands, and shelved knowledge like books in the back of a library needing to be dusted off make me feel like a student.  Yet I am an experienced nurse of 12 years.  But it doesn’t really matter.

I feel exhausted before I have even introduced myself.  Where do I start?  How much of me do I explain?  Do they even care at all?  What does it matter what I have done or known, I am at a new starting place and it may or may not matter, here.  The weight of newness sits on me like wet clothing, heavy.

Restraint.  Admitting dependence.  Taking the posture of a servant.   Remaining a perpetual learner.  Embracing humility again.  I go lower still.  I am a stranger, but I am not unknown by Him who is ever at my side.

Starting over, starting again, setting out, begins with a step.  Just one.  I see the distance and I am paralyzed and overwhelmed.  It is too far, it will take too long, the journey is beyond my desire and ability to endure.  But I must, and I can, with His voice comforting my fears.

Journeys, no matter how long, all begin with one step.  I guess I can take one step.

Today, that step is showing up.  Today, that step is muttering my name again, when someone asks.  Today, that step is making mistakes I won’t make tomorrow.  Today, that step is being willing to start again at all.  One step, in a new direction, is always the hardest one to take.

In what space do you feel like a foreigner?  Do you need courage to start again?  What is the one step you can take today to take you on the journey of where you want to go? 

Psalms 146:9 The Lord protects strangers, the fatherless and the widows.