Today marked the transition between yesterday and tomorrow. Today, I graduated from nursing school. Our nursing school does not call it a graduation, but rather a 'White Coat Ceremony.' We did not march down the aisle, but instead walked up on stage, flanked on either side by our colleagues, and turned while one of our professors helped us to put on our long white coat.

It was an odd day - certainly not filled with the elation of the end of my first bacholers degree - but filled with some sort of pride and satisfaction upon having completed this year. The dean of the school fed us such cliches as "you are the future of nursing" and "the world is your oyster" and most of us spat it back at her with a cynical smile. She also told us, in the words of a famous nurse theororist, that "you are the sight of the newly blind, the leg of the amputee, and the confidence of a new mother." But as I looked around at my fellow nursing students, I would be lying to say that I did not feel a small bit of the cliche somewhere beneath my light blue school of nursing logo that was embroidered onto my white coat. As the rain rattled on the plastic tent roof and the thunder clanked and clashed somewhere in the distance, I did feel some sort of electricity and culmination. Perhaps the joy of chosing a career path that puts patients and people and families first. Perhaps the joy of doing something practical, not theoretical, of gaining a skill set. Perhaps just the joy of completing a task that I had set out too do more than a year ago.

yes, I am proud to enter the field of nursing. It is a mixed up, confused field - unsure of whether it is a profession, an academic dicipline, a focus of research, or just a plain old j-o-b. But somehow it suits me and I am excited to play the role. Even if I never again put on my white coat with the light blue crown.

Because why would I wear the only article of clothing known to raise a person's blood pressure without even moving? No, I am in this profession for the people I will work to heal - and I do not need a white coat to dawn the cloak of nurse.