While suffering through a Covid-era nursing program, a long-held suspicion of mine was confirmed: I hate scrubs. Though they’re often praised by both medical personnel and those outside the field for their comfort, simplicity, and functionality–no need for the tedious agony of choosing an appropriate business-casual ensemble every morning, and the pockets are aplenty!–they have always filled me with a certain dread. Once it came time for me to actually don scrubs the hideous hue of my reviled two-time alma mater, I quickly learned that everything I had suspected I’d loathe about them was true, plus more.
I enrolled in an accelerated BSN (Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing, on the track to a state-specific Registered Nurse license) program for several reasons: 1) I was not heading toward financially stability with my chaotic mixture of part-time legal employment, occasional art moneys, and sporadic sex work; 2) I was at a point in my sobriety where it felt necessary to plan for the future, which I’ve never excelled at; 3) I was generally unfulfilled and dissatisfied. Like many other sober addicts, I became interested in working in the recovery field, and rapidly discovered that the vast majority of related occupations make next to no money, except nurses and psychiatrists. Aside from the impressive salary, even for new graduates, another appeal of the increasingly popular abbreviated nursing program lies in its hyper-practicality. Legions of my contemporaries who paid a small fortune for an idealistic, stimulating, and/or niche undergraduate degree are in the phase of recognizing the near-impossibility of landing anything remotely close to reliable long-term employment. So what is a “Media, Culture, and Communications” (cough) major to do? Luckily, higher-learning institutions heard the anguished cries of the exhausted, gig-hustling millennial, and began offering nursing programs in which one must only commit to 12 to 16 months of studies, on average, provided just about any Bachelor’s degree has already been obtained and relevant prerequisites completed. Nursing is as sensible—as well as traditional, in many senses—an occupation as it gets, and RNs will be heavily in demand for the foreseeable future in an assortment of healthcare settings, so it’s a logical selection when one realizes a need for professional, financial, and, in extension, personal security.
Now that the stage has been set… back to scrubs.
My woes with the Professional Pajamas don’t begin and end with them being unflattering, but that element certainly doesn’t help. For a long long long time before embarking on this journey to gainful employment, my self-styled physical appearance had been integral to how I navigated the world, sought validation, and earned the bulk of my money. With the commitment to pursue this degree came the obligation of adjusting other aspects of my life—namely my creative productivity, including collaging, writing, and rapping; and my involvement in sex work—to accommodate a new schedule and lifestyle. These pursuits had, for years, constituted the majority of my perceived identity. The loss of what I believed to be my selfhood during this transition period was exacerbated by the regular duty of wriggling into baggy V-necks with matching Barney-purple cargos. Stripped of the ability to freely choose my own outfits and adornments, I felt even more removed from the self I thought I knew.
(Perhaps some of the discomfort from having to abandon my honed preening would have lessened if I felt just a sliver of genuine pride in again attending and repping the notoriously money-hungry university at which I’d been an undergraduate, but alas, I am not an academic fangirl. Quite frankly, I find any wildly gung ho behavior re: schools to be utterly bizarre, much like rabid, stringent patriotism, shorn of all critical interpretation and attenuation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Thanks to Covid restrictions, with the exception of in-person, weekly clinicals at affiliated hospitals, the first three quarters of the four-semester program were entirely online. This is obviously less than ideal for any educational endeavor at any price, but especially for an all-but-entirely hands-on degree costing its students 6 figures for the pleasure. Anyway, the prescribed state of affairs did not lend itself to establishing and cultivating viable personal or professional relationships, whether with peers or professors. For me, the fact that clinicals were, for the bulk of the 13 months, the sole true face-to-face opportunity for such interactions added to my typical social anxiety. To a seemingly more extreme extent than those around me, I was accustomed to my chosen physical presentation doing some of the initial heavy lifting upon meeting someone new, and I felt strongly identified with how I decided to clothe and embellish myself. More specific to makeup—which tends to also be regulated in most hospital environments—I concluded that, aside from simply feeling more confident in my own particular choices, I had no idea what I looked like entirely minus cosmetics. After clawing my way through an awkward phase that ravaged my formative pubescent years and being Internet-branded a “butterface” often enough, I developed a makeup routine that is applied almost as soon as I wake up. (To this day, my iPhone Face ID doesn’t even know who I am with a completely bare face.) By 2021, when this program kicked off, I had grown comfortable with and relatively accepting of my allegedly polarizing face, provided that I executed this very precise ritual. This option, in its preferred entirety, being abruptly eliminated caused my facial insecurities to come rushing back in, full force, which, unsurprisingly, did not help me to feel self-assured in a novel environment crammed with stressful interactions involving fellow students, medical personnel, and incapacitated patients.
Alongside the chorus of concerns that cropped up re: my face, there was an additional component of perturbation that revolved around my body, with the scrubs all but eliminating its contours. I had become quite used to wearing pretty much exclusively form-fitting clothes that emphasized my genetic blessings: alluring waist-to-hip ratio, flat stomach, and [eventually] well-shaped tits. This started when I was the most self-conscious about my hate-it-or-love-it facial features, as a means of focusing the beholder instead on my societally-approved and -promoted frame and proportions. The staunch dedication to accentuating and displaying was reinforced when I got involved in fetish modeling and sex work, since, of course, one’s body is integral to success in those domains (and, sadly, not altogether irrelevant in most other areas of life). Also, in my twenties, I was on a mission to both “make up for lost time” and prove to myself that I was attractive enough to ensnare devastatingly beautiful men, who represented the zenith of male perfection to me in my youth and beyond. In scrubs that hung on me loosely, I felt shorn of the so-called social capital genetically bestowed upon me.
As decidedly someone not gifted with a natural, charming penchant for conversation and the inborn ability to make others feel at ease by my mere nurturing presence, I began to see very clearly—without the option of avoiding by looking or running away—that sans the comfort of my hand-sewn, nurtured armor of costume as a starting point, I was all on my own.
And I was lacking.
(Disclaimer: I know I’m running the risk of coming across all “feel bad for me, I’m hot and no one can see boohoo” which I’m aware sounds sort of gross, but this is my honest thought process, which I don’t think should be judged as boasting or not acknowledging privilege, etc. We all navigate the world in our bodies, and we all are deeply affected by that fact, and we all can express how and why. )
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Another critical aspect I recognized in my aversion to scrubs is the fact that—no matter what we do and where we work—we are inevitably required to disguise and adjust parts of ourselves to conform to The Professional Environment. It felt like the final blow of compulsory anonymity to also be forced to relinquish many or most distinguishing physical choices. After nearly 30 years of feeling closer to a nonentity than the opposite, I could sense a potent fear at the prospect of having the identity I’d worked tirelessly to cobble together erased, even if only situationally and symbolically.
The following excerpt is from the long-form version of the 4th step in Alcoholics Anonymous: “As we redouble our efforts at control, and continue to fail, our suffering becomes acute and constant. We have not once sought to be one in a family, to be a friend among friends, to be a worker among workers, to be a useful member of society. Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap, or to hide underneath it. This self-centered behavior blocked a partnership relation with any one of those about us.” This concept of being “a worker among workers” haunted me as I continued through sobriety, for two distinct but intertwined reasons. The first is that I wanted, and still want, to be and feel special. I acutely desire appreciation and acclaim for the fruits of my creative labors, and to whittle my existence down to just being of service to others did not seem like enough. The second is that I’d long harbored the conviction that I was one of those people painfully incapable of navigating and succeeding in the adult world. Because I had spent much of my life up until that point finding sundry ways to circumvent unpleasant activities such as full-time legal employment, the more I evaded and eluded, the greater my belief that I couldn’t do it if I tried grew. Although I had done well academically and socially, all things considered, when I subsequently failed the licensing exam (having foolishly trusted my corrupt institution’s insistence that they had prepared us sooooo well for the NCLEX, 99% of us would pass on the first attempt), this suspicion that I simply couldn’t hack it became more and more convincing.
Spoiler: I eventually triumphed over the NCLEX, obtained my license, and have worked 2 jobs as an RN. Amusingly, I haven’t actually had to wear scrubs for either of these positions, as they were community-based outreach programs and encouraged more casual attire to minimize to better relate to participants.
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The last piece of this puzzle has its roots in a lifelong disinclination to labeling or aligning myself with any group or community. I estimate that the origin of this habit stems from an adolescence absent of genuine passions and talents. I didn’t even possess the energy to bother to fake it, though I was a nominal member of the Gay-Straight Alliance as well as the slowest at the mile on the junior varsity field hockey team, just to seem well-rounded for college. But as time continued and I did develop true interests, I had became self-destructively adept at hovering on the periphery of human clusters, lest I be rejected and ousted. As such, I shuddered at the idea of dubbing myself an “artist” or a “poet,” a reluctance only intensified by the pretentiousness I considered inherent in these designations, plus every other female Brooklynite describing herself as “a creative” (bleh @ this now being a noun) in her IG bio, CV, and dominatrix ad.
Invariably, self-identifications will inspire assumptions. When it comes to joining the ranks of one of the oldest (but not the oldest, wink wink) professions—ranked “The Most Trusted” for years and years on end—there are considerable expectations regarding what such a “medical professional” should know and be capable of. These presumptions emphatically do not line up with the knowledge and skills I acquired. Post-graduation, I began to sporadically receive casual inquiries about minor injuries and ailments from friends and family, and had to inform them that I, quite frankly, did not learn shit. These protests were usually met with the response that I wasn’t giving myself “enough credit” for all my hard work. But when I tell you that I was not given a thorough education (didn’t learn how to take blood or insert an IV, never really had to memorize the flow of blood through the heart, anatomy & physiology details were wiped from my brain as soon as the finals were over, etc. etc.) in an accelerated nursing program… during a global pandemic… at a university that wants your money above all else… just believe me.
As we all know, nurses garnered major—if often performative—attention and gratitude in the earliest days of Covid, with countless news reports of their heroic efforts, along with conditions at healthcare facilities and on-the-rise burnout.
Once, when I was on the subway to a clinical while wearing my scrubs, I was accosted by a well-meaning stranger who fell over themselves profusely thanking me for the important work I was doing throughout these unprecedented times. I just smiled and nodded.
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Monday is the first day of a new job, which will finally require me to become intimately reacquainted with my least favorite co-ord set. I definitely do now have a more firm, solid sense of self that does not feel as fragile and reliant on visual presentation, but I still have a pit in my stomach.
I fear the shame of becoming preoccupied with the superficial even in the midst of such an ostensibly noble professional mission.
I fear the discomfort of feeling like an imposter and allowing it to sabotage everything, again.
I fear the possibility of getting in my own way for all the most self-centered reasons.