A Long Time Coming

Yeah, not that it'll be a surprise, but I think it's about time to shut this thing down.  At least for a while.   For one, way the hell too many real world folk know who I am now, which is pretty astounding for a blog I basically told zero people about when I started it.  The more common knowledge this thing is, the higher the likelihood that it will cause me problems.  Paranoid? Probably.  But shit, guys, I don't really have many other skills than being an ER nurse, and I got bills to pay.
That's really not all, though.  This might be harder for me if I was even getting the same things out of it as when I started, but it's different.  I'm in a different place now than when I started in that the challenges in my career are not so much needing a place to vent as needing a place to reflect.  And while I'm sure that heavy shit I occasionally put out here is super fun to read all the time, it's about equally fun to write (i.e. not at all.)  As much as the times I manage to put my doubts out there tend to clear my head; as much as the feedback I get from all the wonderful people that read this blog tends to give me a new perspective and heal my wounds and help me to forgive myself, I can't help but feel like my struggles are essentially the same ones over and over again.  Plus, it isn't like any of you are getting paid to be my therapist or anything.
When I started in the ER I really just needed to relay and almost confirm that the alternate reality, the moments that if I didn't know better, I would think were staged by some tru TV camera crew, that it wasn't just me getting shocked out of my suburban white girl shell, but that this shit actually was crazy. Some of it's still a little funny.  Sometimes the alternate reality confused me, or made me angry, and I kind of just needed to way to make sense of it all.  It's an interesting position to be in, though, when the emotions that you have basically based your writing on are really no longer your own.  What I once would have considered shocking or funny worthy of my ire just simply is now.  Combative drunks and drug seekers are my day to day world.  For the last couple of months, I've felt like I've actually struggled to make jokes about some of the things I see, to keep up my snark and cynicism about things that when they happened to me, elicited little more than an eye roll.  Things that were mildly annoying that I would certainly forget about were it not for me trying to drudge them up and force myself to feel something about them one way or another.
And ultimately, trying to drudge up snark is a very troublesome thing when it comes to my other struggles.  The struggle to be kind, to be nonjudgmental, a good Christian- one that puts living the way I'm called to live above people thinking I'm funny or smart.  I've been- I'll say reading- struggling- through Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Discipleship over the last several months.  For those unfamiliar with Bonhoeffer, he was an incredible German theologian and modern martyr, that regardless of your religious affiliation or lack thereof, is worthy of endless admiration.  Bonhoeffer lived and wrote about the Christian life in a way that is more challenging and demanding of action that anything I've ever encountered.   His adherence to his principles and his faith ultimately lead to his death at the hand of the nazis in 1945.  
The point of all this is that his works have really caused me to look at myself and see the hypocrisy and my own ongoing willingness to try to be kind and gentle in some facets of my life and judgement and hateful in others.  I have a big problem with making observations and forming immediate judgements.  It's in my nature.  I know this is always going to be a point I struggle with.   The way Bonhoeffer talks about it, though, is enlightening.  If you'll humor me, he says "Judging is the forbidden evaluation of other people. It corrodes simple love. Love does not prohibit my having my own thoughts about others or my perceiving their sin, but both thoughts and perceptions are liberated from evaluating them. They thereby become only an occasion for that forgiveness and unconditional love Jesus gives me."
I know this is right.  I know that what this blog- maybe what it started as, or maybe what it's become, has been a platform from which I've judged others very harshly while ignoring my own piles of bullshit. I do this plenty at work and at home without having yet another outlet in where I feed off my own negativity. I just feel like stepping away right now is a necessary step in cutting ties with some of the things inside me I don't like
I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense, or if it seems like I've gone of the deep end.  The one thing I will truly regret about leaving this behind is all the kindness and grace I've received from so many of you in my times of need.  So many of you have really embodied the spirit of this "simple love" that I'm striving for with varying degrees of success (mostly very little) as of late.  Hopefully I can get better at this, and maybe find a way to talk about what I do from a more positive place.  Until then- thank you all for everything.