Okay, first day at the very first practice place over. Actually it was over several hours ago, I just needed time to make sense of the seven hours.
Irrelevant ramble about those seven hours: I ended up on the psychogeriatric ward. In my humble opinion, the sanest person is as far as the official records are concerned the most psychiatric of them all. Seven loooooooong hours... and eight tomorrow... Well, it's not really as bad as I feel towards it at the moment. My co-workers seem okay (especially that one; she's absolutely gorgeous), and my duties won't be challenging theoretically at any point of the three weeks I'll spend there since I'm the only one to study nursing. My mentor has the "lähihoitaja" qualification, the other is "apuhoitaja" and miss Gorgeous apparently has tried to get in to the Polytechnic to study nursing. I hope she gets in at some point, she does it all more naturally than I ever can...
But the main point of contemplation lasting for the last previous week. I will finish the two practises I have signed up for, but starting from next spring the Polytechnic studies comes a f t e r the university studies. Last spring I saw no reason to continue to the Master's Degree, since I wouldn't be needing one as a translator. Nursing was then my plan B.
Now, after trying nursing in both practise and theory, nursing is not even a tolerable plan B. I doubt I, or anyone else for that matter, really ever truly believed I had any kind of calling towards nursing; it was the almost hundred percent employment statistics that appealed to me and further encouraged me to apply to the Polytechnic. I applied because I couldn't be sure whether or not nursing would be enjoyable if I didn't try it, and in order to do that I had to study nursing.
Now, after trying nursing in both practise and theory, I am convinced nursing will not be what I want to do with my life. But nevertheless, I won't quit at the Polytechnic after this first year, I'll just sign up as an absent student for two years. That time I will pursue the Master's in English and by the time's up I should have figured out if I seriously still want to continue at the Polytechnic. Probably not but I find comfort in the idea of having one more option open to me (no matter how dreadful they appear to me). No, the new plan B, before neglected due to the thing that it forces me to go back to the place I can say I truly HATE (also known as the junior high), actually seems rather appealing: I get to wear my own clothes, my tattoos woould cause no problems none whatsoever (one of the English teachers has a very nice big eagle tattooed on the left side of their neck!) and I would get to keep a touch to the academic society, the only one that has ever made me feel like I actually belong there and that I'm good at that.
So, now I'm trying to get through the two practises and then go on with the nursing studies on the university schedule's conditions, not vice versa as I've done this autumn. Then I'll continue as an absent student at the Polytechnic and concentrate on the master's studies at the university (once I switch the major from Finnish into English as it should have been from the beginning). And then I'll get the pedagogical studies somehow (if I'm lucky, they may have started providing them here by the time I finish my Master's Thesis on LGBT literature; then I wouldn't have to leave the Land of the Rising Son at all!!!).
Thumbs up, people. I know this all probably sounds very undetermined and as if I have no direction, but you're wrong; for the first time in a very long time I have a target I want to pursue and means I enjoy to get there. So I began and dropped out of the Polytechnic somewhere in the middle, big deal. Maybe that's what I needed to do to understand what I really want, that teaching is not such a bad option after all (as long as I don't have to spend any more time in a single junior high than is required to get the teacher's qualification, of course). Everything seems so clear careerwise. I feel very relieved.
"Feeling lonely and content at the same time,
I believe is a rare kind of happiness."
('The Lagoon' by Nightwish)
I agree.
