This is not your average coaching origin story, and that’s exactly why you may see yourself in it.
I spent 23 years as an ICU nurse.
I want to sit there for a second, because most coaching origin stories start with a business problem. A failed launch. A burnout year. Mine doesn’t.
Mine starts in a room where the machines are breathing for somebody, and a family is standing in the hallway waiting for me to come tell them what’s true.
If you’ve never worked in critical care, here’s what you need to know about it: the ICU does not care how you’re feeling on any given day. Somebody is at the very edge of their life, and you are one of the people holding the line.
There is no version of that job where you get to be halfway present. You show up fully, every shift, or people get hurt.
And here’s the thing: I was good at it. I don’t say that to brag. I say it because it’s the beginning of the problem.
I was the steady one. The one you wanted in the room when everything went sideways. The one who could hold a dying man’s hand and chart his meds and manage his terrified daughter in the hallway all in the same hour, and never once let you see it cost me anything.
You Don’t Get Holidays Off
In healthcare, you don’t get holidays off. That’s just one perk you sign away with the hiring contract. People die every day – including holidays. When I was 34 years old, I was working a Thanksgiving Day.
I remember exactly how old I was because that entire shift we had fought for the life of a 34-year-old woman with one of the worst strains of the flu I had ever seen in anyone under the age of 70.
She was healthy – no comorbidities, no history of drug or alcohol use, normal BMI – nothing that would put her in my ICU on Thanksgiving Day fighting for her life.
Yet, there we were.
That was a 16-hour shift for me because I was fighting as hard as she was. We tried everything – rotunda bed, kamikaze cocktails of meds, cold IV fluids, ice baths, straight battlefield tactics.
And I still had to walk into the waiting room and tell her husband, as he held their sleeping 1-year-old son, that she was gone.
I went home that night and slept on the floor beside my one-year-old son’s crib – just to hear him breathing. I guess I was hoping he could hear me too. It was a lot. And sadly, that was a normal day.
But here’s what was happening underneath all that excellence.
Somewhere in those years, slowly, inconspicuously, and without ever deciding to… I was disappearing into the role.
Twenty-three years of that will teach you things most people never learn.
I watched what people hold onto at the end of their lives. And I promise you, it is never the stuff we spend our days grinding for.
I learned what a body under stress actually does, from the inside.
And I learned something I did not have language for until much later.
Competence is a kind of love language.
It is also a kind of hiding place.
If I could fix your pain, I did not have to think about mine.
If I learned more, helped more, stayed longer, stood stronger, arrived at the answer before anyone else did, then maybe I would finally feel okay.
Maybe I would finally feel like… enough.
Being steady wasn’t a virtue. It was a survival strategy that had gotten so good at its job I started calling it my identity.
For years, I thought it was the career that was draining me.
So I walked away.
I put down the scrubs and the title and the pager and every single thing that had told me who I was for over two decades.
I thought I would feel relief.
That’s what everyone tells you, right? Leave the thing that is draining you, and you will feel free, lighter…finally yourself.
That is not what happened.
What happened instead was a kind of identity collapse I was completely unprepared for. Because when the role went away – the scrubs, the title, the being-needed, the crisis-competence… I came face to face with a question I could not answer:
If I’m not the capable one… who am I?
Who Is Actually Here?
If I’m not the one who handles everything… who am I? If I’m not the steady one, the strong one, the one who never falls apart… then who is actually here?
And friend, I’m going to tell you the truth: for a while, I did not know. There was a silence where a self was supposed to be.
Because when the fixer was gone, so was I.
Everything I had been running from was waiting for me.
And in the silence, it had grown teeth.
It was like looking into a mirror and not seeing a reflection…
To Be Continued…
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