On a rainy day in May, three weeks before our end-of-year recital, I was watching my advanced students rehearse their piece. There were a few challenging elements we had been working on for several months. A younger teacher on my staff had diligently learned and developed conditioning exercises to help them achieve these skills, and almost every one of the dancers had successfully executed them at one time or another.
But the connection between the movements just wasn’t there. They looked like they were running from one element to the next.
So I stopped the music.
“Listen, I can teach a monkey how to do tricks. I understand why you love learning and achieving the tricks. I do. I get it. But the dancing doesn’t happen during the tricks. The dance happens during the transitions. That’s what connects the elements. That’s what breathes life into it. THAT IS WHAT MAKES IT DANCING!”
I have thought of that rainy day, and countless similar ones, many times since I left the studio. For the better part of three years, I worked full-time and went to school full-time. I was constantly finding myself in new situations, meeting new people, and being trained and taught by people younger than I – some half my age.
I felt energized, engaged, inspired, and ready to take on whatever came my way. I was also exhausted, nervous, humbled, and missing time with my friends and family. I felt younger and spry, as if I were back in college or at a dance intensive.
Even after 24 years as a teacher and owner, I hadn’t forgotten what it felt like to be a student. I had spent countless hours in studios adapting to different teachers—the kind and calm ones and the ones who yelled colorful, occasionally degrading things across the room. I learned to take what they had to teach me and perform as well as I could.
But the last time I had been a full-time student was more than 30 years ago.
Unbeknownst to me, I look older than I did in the early ’90s. I guess the head full of silver hair and my willingness to sit in the front row, nodding and listening intently to every teacher, gave something away.
I also showed up on time and dressed for class. Usually a little dolled up. I was genuinely confused by classmates who wandered in late looking as though they had just rolled out of bed. I was even more baffled when someone called in sick because they’d been out too late the night before.
What are they doing?
And then I remembered.
Oh. They’re college kids.
In truth, many of my classmates weren’t traditional college students at all. They were balancing school with young children, spouses, jobs, and family responsibilities. Most of the time, I was in awe of them. They were funny and self-deprecating one minute, astute and badass the next. I envied the long careers ahead of them and also felt protective of them. I wanted them to make it.
I loved nursing school.
I didn’t love having time for almost nothing but work and studying, but I loved being there. Age brings an awareness of how temporary the stages of life are. I knew that if I stayed the course, eventually this one would be behind me.
Getting to be a beginner again—and immersing myself in something I had wanted to do since I wrote my vocational notebook freshman year of high school—was energizing. It was like opening a trap door that led into infinity.
I quickly realized that no matter how hard I tried, I would never catch up to nurses my age who had spent their entire careers in the profession. I would never know it all. Every skill I mastered would reveal something else I didn’t know yet. Rather than feeling discouraged, I felt inspired. There would always be more to learn, another skill to develop, another direction I could take.
I would never be bored.
I was thrilled to graduate. It took about four weeks to take my boards and another three to receive my license. Luckily, there were openings for nurses on the unit where I had worked as a CNA during school, so seven weeks after graduating, I started my first job as an RN.
Almost immediately, people started commenting on my navy scrubs—the color nurses wear at my hospital. I was surprised by how many coworkers congratulated me or simply told me how much they liked seeing me in navy.
Apparently, I looked like a nurse.
My preceptors were patient, respectful, thorough, and kind. We laughed a lot. I was also frustrated at times, mostly by the enormous gap between becoming licensed to practice nursing and actually knowing how to be a nurse.
It still amazes me. You graduate from nursing school. You pass the NCLEX. The state issues you a license.
And then you are a registered nurse.
I had never experienced an identity quite like that.
As a dancer, I was reluctant to call myself a dancer for years. I wasn’t sure I had earned the title yet. I’m still not sure what I thought would qualify me. Was it a certain number of years spent training? A certain level of proficiency? Being paid to perform? I don’t know. Oddly enough, I don’t think I became completely comfortable claiming it until after I had left that part of my life behind.
Then I could say easily, I was a dancer. I was a dance teacher.
Now here I was saying, I’m a nurse.
The responsibility felt different. I had always taken teaching seriously. Dance teachers can have an enormous influence on their students, for better or worse, and I understood that what I said and how I taught could stay with a young person long after she left my studio. I wanted my students to discover what they were made of and what they were capable of. I reminded them often that who they were when no one was watching might matter more than anything they could accomplish onstage.
Nursing carried another kind of responsibility. Now the person depending on me might be sick, frightened, unstable, or trusting me to notice something important. Thinking too hard about that could be overwhelming.
And yet, I was enormously proud to be a nurse. I felt as though I had been admitted into this remarkable group of brilliant, quirky, observant advocates.
And, dare I say it, badasses.
At first, I felt as if everyone around me—including the patients—knew more than I did. I was task-oriented and painfully aware of my lack of fluidity with many of the hard skills. I didn’t speak up much, and I rarely asked patients if they had questions.
Whenever I could, I rounded with the doctors. I listened to them explain things to patients and families, partly so I could learn to recognize clinical patterns and partly so I could understand what I might need to explain again later.
One day, I was rounding with a physician who had known his patient for years. He was explaining something to her, and I could tell she wasn’t understanding him. I don’t remember what the issue was or what he was recommending. What I do remember is the uncomfortable internal debate about whether I should say something.
I stood there listening for a couple of minutes.
Finally, I interrupted.
I explained the same concept in a different way, one I thought might make more sense to her. And suddenly, it did. She understood what the doctor was recommending and agreed to it.
It was a small moment, but something shifted for me.
A patient may be living in her own body, with her own disease and her own circumstances, but that doesn’t mean she understands what is happening to her or has all the information she needs to make a decision. Providers don’t always have enough time to address every question or concern. And often, patients haven’t had enough time to absorb what they’ve just heard to even know what questions they want to ask.
But I knew something about that.
I had spent decades watching people learn. I knew how to recognize when someone wasn’t understanding what was being presented, and I knew how to approach the same idea from another direction. I had done it countless times with dancers whose bodies and brains processed information differently.
I hadn’t stopped being a dance teacher when I became a nurse.
I had simply brought the teacher with me into a different room.
Nursing school had taught me how much of nursing involves teaching. But as a brand-new nurse, I had been so consumed with completing tasks and performing hard skills that I had temporarily lost my voice.
I found it again that day.
My patient understood.
And the doctor wasn’t one bit irritated that the brand-new nurse had interrupted him. That helped too.
There is a lot I don’t know each time I arrive at work. I don’t know which patients I’ll care for. I don’t know how the patients from my previous shifts are doing that day, and I usually don’t know which of my teammates will be working.
I don’t know how the trajectory of my nursing career will unfold, and I have no idea what opportunities lie ahead of me.
But I do know this: learning something new, no matter the subject, has a familiar rhythm. It is always a transition. It involves risk and discomfort, but it also involves joy, timing, and a little luck.
Like a dance that never really ends, the best part is in the thick of the mess—getting from one element, one trick, to the next.
That’s what makes a dancer the one we can’t take our eyes off of. It isn’t just the tricks she can execute. It’s the way she moves between them—with purpose, intention, and joy. She listens to the music. She adapts to what’s happening around her. And when something doesn’t go quite as planned, she keeps dancing.
