Suffering and powerlessness

I completed all of my requirements for my BSN last month. However, my school will not actually confer the degree until mid-August. So, I figured I would take an elective course this month. I have never actually taken a nursing elective, so I figured it couldn't hurt and might help. I am taking a spirituality and healthcare class.

The good news is that I'm taking this course with a professor who I took a course under last summer. The better news is that she was aware last summer was the first anniversary and remembered that this summer is two years. Fortunate, since the class has at times been gut wrenching for me to engage in.

This week took that to a whole new level. There is nothing quite like having to academically discuss suffering and powerlessness in the week that you already reliving your own. Simply put, it is impossible to maintain your participating at a strictly academic discussion when it becomes such a personal process of unpacking and reliving your past suffering.

I cannot remember that I have outright cried in school, since probably my elementary years. However, twice in class discussion this week, which I had the fortune of being a voice discussion rather than the written word where I could disguise the flowing of emotions, I have in fact cried.

The only thing I can hope that this week has brought is not some greater understanding on my part for what suffering is like, as that is not possible. I hope that by exposing my own pain, I have made it more real and more personal for my classmates. That was all I truly had to offer to the discussion at the end of the day.

Furthermore, I broke my own rule. I quoted one of my posts here about the last days of Micah's life in the paper I submitted. While I referenced myself sa a journal, I imagine if my professor chooses to search, she will find this blog. I can hope that she does not, as I deeply crave my privacy to journal in a manner that my words are present should someone else need to hear them, but without exposing me personally. However, if she does, then the best I can at least accept is that this is my final BSN class and I move onto a different University this fall so I will fade into annonimity just the same.

Yet, when the week's lessons are over, I am still left with the fog of my own suffering still spread across my psyche. It will fade. The emotions that I keep locked in their box except when I deem it safe to unpackage them will slowly over the next day or so be shoved back in and the lid slammed back down. Still, having had to not only open the box but examine those feelings for a week, they linger now, mocking my life I have created in the last two years, haunting me that on my horizon that suffering is ever present, ever capable of crushing me. It leaves me exhausted.....and all for the sake of allowing others to learn from my experiences for a week.