I Could Have Been a Nurse

I could have been a nurse. When I think about Loyola Marymount University’s ever-increasing tuition and the four years I’ve spent working for my dream to write, edit, and publish books, the countless hours I’ve studied for midterms and final exams, all the essays and papers I’ve researched and written, I think about what was it all for? And more importantly, was it worth it?

I could already be working: adjusting IVs, assisting surgeons in emergency operations, genuinely helping people feel better while earning a salary that rivals a year's tuition at LMU (all under 2 years of nursing school at 1/10th of LMU's price). But no, I dreamt of becoming a book editor, a journalist, a writer. I dreamt of meeting people, telling their stories. I dreamt of writing something honest and real and people read and feel affected by my words.

But after 4 years of dreaming working for it, all I've is guilty and scared.

I’m finally a senior, aren’t I supposed to be having fun instead of worrying about if there will even be jobs for me to apply to when I graduate? Disneyland’s recent commercials sing happily, “It’s the time of your life” and their theme for 2009 is “Celebrate You”, which seems all the more relevant considering I will soon be graduating this year. The world is supposed to be ahead of me, but more and more I’m feeling my dreams are slowly slipping away.

And I think to myself, I could have been a nurse. It’s become a haunting mantra, whenever I hear anything negative or pessimistic about our nation’s future. Even worse, is that I feel other people are starting to think the same when they look at me. Suddenly, I hear you could have been a nurse when I look at my aunts and uncles. Being that I’m Filipino, it’s only natural that I would have chosen to become a nurse. It’s our country’s chief export: nurses. Becoming a nurse was the last thing on my mind.

But my best friend, Len, who is just about to enter nursing school reminds me, “Would you have been happy?”

Would I have been happy being a nurse instead of a writer? The truth is, I don’t know. I do love science and I’m great at it. I love helping people and that’s what a nurse’s job is. It may not be my dream, but it’s a job I could be satisfied with.

And the truth is, I don’t know what qualifies as happy in this country anymore if I can’t even look forward to graduating, to finally ending my schooling, grow up and become an adult in the real world. I just feel tired, scared, and old and that’s a problem, because I shouldn’t. Perhaps the real future our so-called grown-ups should be worried about isn’t the economy’s, or which companies to bail out of bankruptcy, or the Middle East’s. It’s ours.

Because what they do, what they talk about, doesn’t just affect them. It affects us more, because we will have to pay for it and are paying for it even now. And my fear is, that we will end up sacrificing our dreams, just to survive. Just so that we all can survive. I could have been a nurse, but I don’t know if that would have been enough.

Issa Morada