There is a kind of nurse who needs to know what the shift will hold.
I am not that kind.
Today I work medical-surgical and telemetry. For three years before settling here I floated — no home floor, no unit that was mine, sent where I was needed, sometimes the medical floors, sometimes psych, rarely knowing in advance which it would be. And before that, starting in 2011, I was a travel nurse. Contracts, assignments, new buildings, new teams. Fifteen years, and the word travel has been stitched into my job title the entire time.
Most nurses find this destabilizing. The unfamiliar floor. The unread room. The shift that could become anything. For many people, the not-knowing is the stressor — the thing that wears them down and burns them out.
For me it runs the other way.
The not-knowing is where my comfort lives. The unpredictability is what gives the work joy instead of weight. Same conditions. Opposite response. I have wondered for a long time why, and I think I finally understand it.
Where the openness was given
Between the ages of five and twelve, I traveled. My father worked his life in the travel industry — a travel agency, then Ethiopian Airlines, then managing agencies across West Africa. I moved with that life. New country, new language, new ground, again and again, during exactly the years that decide how a person sees the world.
A child learns one of two lessons from that. Either the corner you cannot see around is a threat — and you grow up braced. Or the corner is simply the next place, where the interesting thing is waiting — and you grow up open.
I grew up open.
Those early years of adapting to many environments became the bedrock of who I am. Not a metaphor. The actual foundation. The unfamiliar room does not ask something foreign of me. It calls up the oldest skill I have. Walk in, read it, steady it, make it workable — I learned that before I had words for it. Med-surg, telemetry, the psych floors I once covered — the building just hands the skill back to me, shift after shift.
So the not-knowing does not drain me. It feeds me. I will say the thing that sounds strange to say out loud: I find joy in not knowing what is around the corner. It makes the work exciting. It is, in some deep way, where I am most at home.
And the second truth
And here is the second truth, the one that lives right beside the first.
I absorb what is in the room.
The same openness that lets me adapt to any floor is what lets the pain in. The fear, the grief, the hardest hour of a stranger's life — I take it into my own body. This is not the same as being tired. Tired is solved by sleep. This accumulates. It is the slow cost of a person who gives outward for a living and feels everything she walks into.
So both things are true of me at once. The unfamiliar energizes me. The suffering inside it still settles in my body. The novelty is fuel. The empathy is the cost. They are not in tension — they are two honest facts about the same nurse, and they grow from the same root. The very openness that makes the work joyful is the thing that needs replenishing.
Rest is not quite the right word. What I need is not to stop moving. I need to move for myself.
That is the part caregivers get wrong, myself included, for years.
We think rest is the cure for exhaustion. But for someone built like me, rest is not quite the right word. What I need is not to stop moving. I need to move for myself — to point the openness at something that gives instead of takes. To walk into an unfamiliar place that asks nothing of me but to be present in it. To stand somewhere new and simply receive it, the way I received the world as a child, before the work, before the cost.
I spent fifteen years moving for the job. Contracts, assignments, floors. Movement in service of patients and agencies and the paycheck that held my family up. But moving for others is not the same as moving for yourself. A travel nurse can spend a decade and a half in motion and never once go somewhere just to come back whole.
Returning to the source
So when I talk about travel now, I am not talking about escape from the work. I love the work. The not-knowing is the best part.
I am talking about returning to the source that makes me good at it.
The openness to the unknown was a gift given to me early, and I have been spending it at the bedside for fifteen years without ever going back to the well that filled it. Travel for myself is the well. It is not indulgence. It is maintenance on the one instrument I bring to every room.
If you are a nurse who loves the unknown the way I do — go somewhere that is only yours. Not a contract. Not an assignment. A place that asks nothing of you. You will come back with more to give, because you will have finally given some of it to yourself.
The corner you cannot see around was never a threat.
It is still the next place. It is still where the interesting thing is waiting.
Go around it.