The First Ten Minutes

Why is it that the first ten minutes of every new situation seem to be the scariest? I honestly think that is where Eminem gathered the lyrics for the song, Lose Yourself. He paints this picture with his lyrics of a dude scared to death of the unknown, fearing the worst…..his palms begin to sweat….trying to look calm on the surface but actually his mom’s spaghetti is spewing everywhere. These are the moments I see the most growth in myself. It pushes me so far out of my comfort zone to the point of nausea. Gosh, my stomach is doing flips right now just trying to capture this feeling. It’s the first ten minutes of anything new. It’s a first date. It’s a job interview. It’s meeting new people. It’s walking into a new church. It’s this thrill that I hate and yet live for at the same time. I love proving to myself, “you can do this.” Nobody wants to be that new person scared crapless in a group full of people who knows where their place is and what they’re doing. It is human nature to want to be the best at everything we do from the very beginning. But what if these many “first ten minutes” are there for a reason? What if we looked at our heart racing as a blessing that God created us to have protective mechanisms built into our bodies that are helping to prepare us for the challenge that lies ahead of us?

It’s the months, weeks, days, and hours that lie before the first ten minutes that might actually be worse than the event itself. Why is that? Because we create an entire narrative of what it will be like before we even catch a glimpse of reality. I’ve begun reading, “The Subtile Art of Not Giving an F,” and I have to say, I am learning A LOT. People who are confident, don’t have to look in the mirror and say to themselves, “I am confident.” They just are. So why do we make up this multiple scenarios of possible negative situations we might encounter on these “firsts?” Instead, what if we walked into every one of these situations with our head held high and acknowledged that, “hey I am human, and I’m going to mess up, because the only thing I am actually perfect at, is being imperfect, but I will do the very best I can.” But we can all say that, right? And you’re probably thinking, “right AM, show me what that actually looks like.” Sure, sure, please allow me…So I began this thing called travel nursing. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s pretty simple, it means I am nuts and have decided to move cities and travel across the country 13 weeks at a time and attempt to be sufficient at being an ER nurse in all of those different places. Maybe somebody should have explained it that way to me first and I wouldn’t have thought I had the capability to do this after all. Anyways, yesterday was my first day at Doctor’s Hospital in Augusta, Georgia and I walked into that ER with my head held high and pretended to have a hint of a clue as to what was going on. Found my preceptor, and went to work. One of my first patients, was this twenty something year old female with flu like symptoms, so low and behold, the PA orders an influenza swab on her. I walk in there and explain to her, I’ll have to swab both of her nares in order to test her for the flu, and although, it may be uncomfortable, I will make it as quick and painless as possible. She says okay and on we go. Or on I attempted to try. After that conversation, I thought we were on the same page, but twenty minutes later, this girl is crying hysterically, grabbing at my wrist and stopping me from actually entering her nares with my swab and moving her head so that even Jackie Chan himself couldn’t swab this chicks nares. I finally get who knows what on that swab and leave the curtain area feeling quite defeated. I send off the swab and sit down at my desk to chart when the PA comes up to me and says, “Were you able to flu swab that girl?” And I said, “well…..in all honestly, it was a struggle.” And he says, “I mean, yeah, we all heard.” I said, “Oh no, you did?” He said, “I think everyone did.” Haha and then walks away. The guy probably thinks I am incompetent and pretty sucky at my job but you know what? I’d like to see that guy try to flu swab that girl. MOVING ON. If we spend our whole lives, trying to get everyone to see things from our perspective, we’ll die trying. I’d rather die knowing I did the very best I could do at everything I set my heart on and die content.

The first ten minutes suck, they just do. But the more we immerse ourselves in those uncomfortable situations, the less uncomfortable they will become because we have seen the worst that could happen and we’re all still alive to tell the stories. I’ve had dates go so terribly wrong that I would have paid the dude myself to take it all back. And yet, here I am, still single, but one heck of a lot less awkward of a human being than if I had married the dude. The more we can look at situations for what they are instead of what we make them up to be in our head, I think we’ll find that our own brain is what creates the scariest scenario. If I can pass out on my first day of my career, bonk heads with a dude I was trying to hug when he thought I was trying to kiss him, then you can do whatever lies ahead of you. Trust me.