The Importance of Grieving!
I came across a post ( link at end of post) on my timeline on X ( formerly twitter), by a Kenyan Nurse in the U.K talking about her nursing experience in Kenya especially with the managers, which was mostly negative in terms of their support for anything progress related as compared to her experience at an NHS hospital on a ICU unit, where the leadership encouraged progress and supported it. According to her, this latter experience cured her fear and insecurities around sharing her nursing career goals and dreams. From the replies to her post, it seems that she is not alone in having this fear of nurse managers in Kenya. While i can understand where she is coming from and i am happy that she found healing and a positive leadership style at this NHS ICU, unfortunately this is not the case all over, especially from the point of view and experiences of alot of Black Nurses working across NHS hospitals and even beyond.
What Nurse Cate had done was significant and in those series of tweets ( or Xers), she had demonstrated that she had grieved her past job experiences and resulting traums, healed from the traumas and celebrated her victory in her journey towards her nursing career. In her podcast episode( link at end of post) titled ‘How long can you grieve a job’, Dr Monica Cox talks about how much we can lose from our jobs, in terms of how we enter our workspaces full of high hopes and great expectations to grow and thrive, only for the opposite to happen, and we end up leaving, full of disappointment and disenfranchisement. She talks about how these loses are profound for People of Colour (POC) and those from maginalised communities, and how grieving for those loses ( job satisfaction, promotions, safe working places etc) is important to both mental and physical wellbeing, and is something that should be encouraged and acknowledged.
I was reminded how as Black Nurses, we come into nursing full of hopes and expectations to grow and thrive in our workplaces. We enter the workplace in all innocence, giving our all and, more often than not twice as everyone else, shrinking ourselves to fit into places, institutions and structures that are hell bent on drowning our voices and keep us out. We are forced out of jobs and with it out of our careers, growth, seeing through our work and projects we started. We do not get to bear the fruits of our labour, for the workplace is structured to reward hardwork with progress in relation to climbing ladders, one we do not get to do. It is not by accident that we make up the largest agency workforce, because leaving our jobs and working on our own terms is the only way we can survive, provide and protect our peace. We carry with us all of this trauma of loss, loss of identity, loss of self and loss of security. We carry on best we can and rarely do we stop, take stalk and grieve, to heal.
According to Dr. Cox, we need to grieve our work losses and also celebrate the victories no matter how small. When we allow ourselves to grieve, we start on the healing path. Just remember the saying ‘ grief is not linear’ , there is no timeline. Grieve the loss of a stable workplace but also celebrate the reclamation of your peace, working on your terms and protecting your peace.
Tell me what you think. Is grieving for your job important?
The Wandering Nurse X