Saying it Out Loud

Once upon a time, there was very young and naive Princess, who like most Princesses was pondering her grown up future while studying in her last year of high school. She wanted to be more than just a Princess.  This was the 1980's after all , and feminists everywhere had spent the 1970's fighting and burning  bras and enduring saggy breasts to ensure that every woman had the right to a career. Solidarity sisters! But what to do? Decisions. Decisions. 

While the Princess was pondering these major life decisions, her Sociology teacher was handing out the major class assignment for the final year of high school and Ms. Middaugh decided her students would be doing their final paper about alternative /minority lifestyles.  To increase the degree of difficulty, it was announced (among much groaning from the class population) that she was going to assign different topics to each student and she decreed there would be no swapping of topics because some teachers are actually reincarnated medieval torturers who haven't quite let go of their ability to think of unusual ways to torment the people over whom they have ultimate power.

The Princess drew the topic of disability.  

She duly researched, (this was in the days before the internet when research involved consulting other books and resources and actually getting your arse off a chair and making trips to the real library not a virtual one) and wrote and turned in her paper, with footnotes and a bibliography, and everything properly sourced, that as history recalls, she got an A for, and then moved on with her life.  

Fast forward to about 9 months later. The Princess is 18, and has moderately successfully finished high school. As is somewhat common Down Under she was taking a year off between high school and uni /starting an actual proper job, primarily to faff around delaying entry into the adult world. The fancy schmancy term for that now is to call it a "gap" year but everyone knows that's just a thinly veiled term for semi-legitimate slacking off. The Princess was slacking off having a "gap year", and selling cutlery at a department store to little old ladies who thought gold plated cutlery and spork sets were the very height of style. Still looking at her options , she had some irons in the fire career wise, but was still deciding exactly she wanted to do with her life. Hey - you can't rush these things and when you're 18 you seem to have forever.

In retrospect, the universe probably knows what it's about because what happened next set the Princess off on a path that she could never really have foreseen and that was going to influence her life for the next 30 years.

The scene: A Saturday morning in March 1985. The Princess is reading the daily newspaper. She's finished all the good bits and is getting ready to do whatever 18 year old girls did on Saturdays back then. That was so long ago she was probably planning to go and catch a dinosaur or discover fire.  Boyfriend Du Jour ends up driving a chisel through his hand so a trip to the local emergency department is in order. The Princess spend hours in emergency and Boyfriend Du Jour is eventually admitted overnight and the Princess has the dubious honour of staying by his bedside to cheer him up and show her love and support. To alleviate boredom, both from the insufferable ennui that is endemic in hospitals and from the actual boyfriend himself - what was she thinking there- the Princess is going through the paper again, this time from end to end, including the employment section. The Princess spies a job advert calling for applicants to undertake a registered nursing degree specialising in disability which sounded pretty darn interesting, given she already has a basic knowledge of disability thanks to Torturer Teacher.  So she wrote an application, sent it off and the rest my friends, is history. 

From a snot nosed kid who knew nothing ,(but in all honesty probably thought back then she had ALL the answers) the Princess passed her nursing exams and has developed her career and stayed with the same organisation for the last 30 years doing all sorts of different disability related work. She finally landed in paediatrics 13 years ago and felt like she had found her niche. What's not to love about working with kids and some of the best therapy clinicians in the country? And the organisation and most of the people in it have seen her through so many life changes and been so supportive both personally and professionally that the thought of leaving it had never really entered her head (except when she had a really bad day and entertained all those lovely thoughts we all sometimes have about winning lotto and staying home and sewing all day) 

But lately, the Princess has been getting itchy feet.....so she got that checked out at the doctor and he ruled out tinea which left her with the realisation that maybe , just possibly , she wanted to do something different. That maybe, as scary as it was, it was time to extend herself , trust her skills and use that professional knowledge and take a giant leap of faith. 

Do you recall this stack of papers the Princess showed a month or so ago when she talked about having to wade through them (on a weekend no less ) for a work related presentation? 

What she didn't say is that the presentation was actually a job interview. An interview, that in hindsight, seems to have gone rather well since they have offered her a job. 

She is currently hoping that the time she spent in a Turkish prison for littering doesn't turn up on her pre-employment checks....