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| Moving in day - on my way to college. Sept/2009 |
The program I studied in college was Health Information Management. On November 28th 2009, I went on a field trip to a hospital with my Intro to HIM class to get a feel for where we would potentially find employment, and to gain further understanding of what the job as an HIM professional entails.
We all toured the various departments and floors. We were taken to some sort of filing room. Aisles and aisles and skinny rows jammed packed with health records, files, folders. We were lead through the floor of women sitting in cubicles staring at double screened computers who were coding and whatnot and typing away silently on their keyboards. The only word I know of in the English language to describe what was going through my mind is boring.We were then taken down an elevator to the basement of the hospital to this huge concrete underground place full of boxes that were full of more records and papers and files and folders and pictures and x-rays and information waiting to be destroyed. Right when we exited the metal gates of the basement department, my mind raced with fear, concern and confusion. Fear because I was utterly afraid of my career leading in this direction, concern because I had no idea what I was going to do about this program or how I was going to deal with it, and confusion because I totally did not expect my future to look anything like what I had seen.
All I could think was, I do not want to do this.
And this is when my life began to change. We all left the hospital - actually, as we took the elevator back up it broke down and all 20 or 25 of us were stuck in it for about an hour; this was humorous and scary at the same time, but a totally different story to tell altogether - and I could feel something inside of me changed. The stew was beginning to brew.
When I got back to my residence, I went into my room and began researching the program more in depth, and realized how much I hadn't known about it. I realized how much I didn't want to be in it. I was scared. I was shocked. I was lost. What was I going to do?
The big issue about the whole ordeal was that it was a long, hard road for me to get into the program in the first place. Not academically, but because of a relationship I was in (that ended only a couple months before) that made my life terribly difficult in terms of making my own decisions (especially with moving away to school) due to the fact that who I was with was a very restricting person. Loving nonetheless, but jealous, controlling and highly restricting. In fact, the ending of the relationship is what was so changing for me. I don't even know how I can explain it, but it's a monumental aspect to my story and my journey of who I am today. Basically, I was with someone for about four years (all through high school, y'know, high school sweetheart, love of my life, and at the tender age that we were together while still growing up so much, we defined and molded eachother into who we were). So the breakup in August 2009 was tremendous. Huge. Astronomical. Piercingly painful. To have to deal with that and be away from everything you've ever known, smooshed together in a town and school full of people you don't even know, with nobody to really feel you can talk to, is pretty hard and lonely. The girl I am today is not even in the slightest most tiniest way even close to who I was back then. I never meant to get into this topic nor have I wanted to post anything about it on a public blog, but I guess it has everything to do with what this post is about, how my life began to change.
My thoughts are all mumbled and jumbled into pieces right now as I wish I could explain this all so smoothly and perfectly. I guess what I've been trying to say is that, it was so very stressful and painful and difficult yet exciting and rewarding for me to go away to college, and then when I realized that I didn't want to do it anymore, it was just... a big deal. But what I think I'm really trying to say, and what is really truly amazing and enlightening about it all, is that I realized that I wanted to live a life that I love. That I wanted to pursue a life that I enjoy. And this lesson was such a wonderful lesson. I didn't actually think of it as a lesson back then, until all my epiphanies started about a week later... something I will very much so be discussing soon.
I chose Health Information Management because I love health and I thought I loved healthcare. I guess I thought I knew what the program was all about. At least, I knew I loved the human body, so I jumped at the idea of taking an anatomy and physiology class. After I decided otherwise on the program, what I realized I knew I did truly love and was very interested in and passionate about was nutrition. Oh so much. I love nutrition. I am so interested in it. So for the remaining month I had left at school, I researched schools and programs and the qualifications I needed in order to study nutrition in University. After I signed the program withdrawal forms and completed my semester and left back home, I eagerly and excitedly began to do correspondence at home to get the University level credits I needed to go to University. I did complete an English course with an 86% back in February of this year, but since then I have actually made other plans for my future and University isn't it. I talk a bit about it in these posts here and here.
I've learned and had what seems like billions of lessons and epiphanies and life-changing revelations that I will and am eager to discuss very soon! This was only the beginning of the beginning...
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