Yesterday marked my final day of leadership and my transition back to “just being a nurse.” I can’t tell you how exciting that phrase is to me. I have been a nurse for 20 years and spread my time between night shift and day shift, Emergency and Med-Surg, and have been a virtual nurse for a year. The profession of nursing is every evolving and there are pockets of specialty everywhere. The opportunities are endless.

Last year, I was given the chance to become an Assistant Clinical Manager. It wasn’t the first time in my life that I was encouraged to do this position, but I did not have the qualifying education to sit in those roles and nor did I want to go back to school to try to get into the role. This time around, my several decades of experience was deemed enough to give it a try. Virtual nursing is innovative in my area and with innovation comes a certain loss of standard boundaries. It requires flexibility and my director was willing to let me try.

I learned so many things about myself in that position, many of which I didn’t really like. I have spent my life masking in public trying to fit in as a normal person. Though I love my neurodivergence, it is difficult to navigate a world, especially leadership, when you don’t know all of the unwritten rules. There is a whole leadership language that sounds so fake to me. Words have always been so important to me my whole life, it felt like telling lies to people’s faces and no one cared. It is sort of like when a whole group of people does inappropriate things but gets excused or excuses themselves because it goes along with status quo. It’s hard to explain, but lets just say I felt like an imposter for the last six months.

Previous to taking this position, I had spent the last year or so living without a mask. Once I discovered I was on the spectrum, I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to live behind the mask. I was going to be my authentic self all the time and if someone didn’t like me for that, they didn’t belong in my life anyway. This doesn’t mean I was rude or terrible to people, but I was vocal about not understanding social norms. I admitted when I didn’t understand things or needed someone to rephrase an idea so I might be able to see it. I let my stims fly free. I was right with myself for the first time in forever. But this job set me on a backward trajectory. I slowly found myself being someone else for the sake of a few extra bucks an hour.

This may not seem like a big deal, but in conjunction with the schedule I had to work, it stripped me of my creative life. It is hard to make art and write when you are pretending to be someone else. I had written all my life and that work is valid because I did not understand neurodivergence. I did not really know anything about being on the spectrum. All I knew was that I felt different, on the fringe of everything, and invisible. Knowing the truth changed my writing, my ability to create art, and the way I think. I had spent time undoing the compartmentalization of my mind. I spent time learning to let my feelings touch each other.

When I told some work friends that I was leaving leadership, there was a look I’d get. That look that maybe I had given up or was throwing away a good thing. I suppose to most in their career, the farther you go up the ladder, the more you have succeeded. But what I saw during most leadership meetings were faces of people who weren’t sure they loved what they were doing anymore. Everyone looked tired and devoid of the joy that life should bring. I did not want that for myself in any way. So I made the decision to step down.

I feel very satisfied with what I was able to accomplish in six months. I helped build a disaster plan, created infrastructure where there wasn’t any, learned more about the different departments in our building, learned new technologies and found that I was good at helping others fix those technologies. I saw my efficiency in action all the time. I learned how to run meetings, to build alliances, to drive change. This was a great experience in the sense that I got to discover that I could do it. I didn’t have to go through life wondering if I would be good at it. In the end, I was also too efficient. I did the work fast and was left with little to do each day which lead to extreme boredom. I will be forever grateful to my director for allowing me to take on a leadership role and also for being accepting of me leaving it behind. She pushed me when I needed to get out of my comfort zone and was gracious when I had had enough.

This weekend is transition time. Me and the boyfriend are going to a cabin that has 40 acres of trees and hiking, a stream, a pond, a porch with rocking chairs. We are going to be curious kids and find rocks and sticks and get muddy. I am going to teach myself to crochet a hat, I’m going to read books, make delicious meals, lounge in a hot tub, and rebuild some of the relationship that was lost in the last six months, not only with my boyfriend, but with myself. Part of being an adult, is knowing when to say when. It is about recognizing your own boundaries and taking care of yourself, whatever that looks like.

Thanks for showing up. Read. Write. Paint. Laugh every day. Do something fun. Be curious about life. You get this one chance.

Aleathia