1. What’s your name and where are you nursing from? 2. What specialty or setting do you work in? 3. What brought you to The Nurse Sanctuary? 4. What is ONE thing you need more of right now? 5. Share one word that describes where you are in your transformation journey: I'll go first!!!! 🙋🏼‍♀️🙋🏼‍♀️🙋🏼‍♀️ ✨My Name is Rachel Hill and I am nursing from the Wheat state of Kansas! I am licensed in WA, FL, KS, and MO, so I nurse from those places. ✨I am a Family NP, Psychiatric NP, and Holistic NP. I have telemedicine practices and a live holistic practice in my home. ✨I am at the Nurse's Sanctuary because I wanted to bring nurses together a different way. ✨One thing I need more of right now are nurses to connect and fellowship with in this community!🥳🥳🥳🥳 ✨I am at the point of "surrender" in my journey. I can tell you what that means later!

Only nurses will understand why this title is perfect. 💙 We are talking about the songs that are absolutely, clinically, non-negotiably essential to your nursing life. The ones that get you OUT of the car and through those hospital doors when every part of you is debating whether to just drive past. The ones playing in your ears during the commute when you are mentally preparing to be someone's everything for the next twelve hours. The ones blasting in the break room at 0200 when the night shift needs a revival. And the ones — perhaps most importantly — that carry you HOME. The playlist that meets you in the parking lot after the shift ends and begins the specific work of turning the nurse back into the person. The wind-down. The decompress. The I-survived-it-and-now-I-need-to-land songs. We all have them. 💙 And we are never talking about them. ✦ Until now. ✦ This is your space to share the soundtrack of your nursing life — and I want ALL of it 👇 🔥 Your PRE-SHIFT pump-up playlist The songs that activate you. Hype you up. Make you feel like you can handle whatever is waiting on that unit. The ones that make you walk into that building feeling like the main character. Drop them here. 🌿 Your POST-SHIFT wind-down playlist The songs that help you exhale. That signal to your nervous system that the shift is over and you are allowed to come home now. The ones that make the drive home feel less like a decompression chamber and more like a return to yourself. 🌙 Your NIGHT SHIFT survival playlist Because night shift is its own category entirely and deserves its own genre. What keeps you going at 0300 when the unit is quiet and your body is absolutely certain that you should be asleep? 💊 Your I-NEED-TO-GET-THROUGH-THIS-MOMENT song You know the one. The song you put in when the shift is hard and you need thirty seconds in the medication room to find yourself again. What is it? ✦ I will start ✦ My wind-down playlist features anything slow, warm, and slightly soulful —

Yes. We. Do. 💙 Behind every set of scrubs — worn by nurses of every gender, every background, every specialty and every season of this profession — there is a whole human being with gifts that have absolutely nothing to do with a stethoscope. Male nurses. Female nurses. Nurses of every identity who chose this work because something in them knew they were built for it. Every single one of them arrived here carrying more than clinical skills. Nurses paint. Nurses sing. Nurses write poetry at midnight. Nurses grow gardens that would make a horticulturalist weep. Nurses cook like they trained under a chef instead of in a simulation lab. Nurses play instruments, take photographs, sculpt, draw, quilt, dance, compose, and create things with their hands that are pure magic. And this community? This community is full of them. You just have not had a stage yet. 🎤 ✦ Consider this your stage. ✦ The Nurses Sanctuary is not just a place to process the hard things — though it is absolutely that too. It is a place to be seen in the fullness of who you are. The whole nurse. The whole person. The artist, the creator, the gardener, the musician who also happens to save lives for a living. Gentlemen — this means you too. 💙 The male nurses in this community are every bit as creative, every bit as talented, and every bit as welcome to this stage as anyone else. The nurse who plays guitar on his days off. The nurse who cooks like a five-star restaurant happens to exist in his kitchen. The nurse who paints, writes, builds, photographs, or grows things. We want to hear from you. This community is yours. So today we are opening the floor to every nurse in the Nurses Sanctuary — no exceptions, no asterisks. 🎤 Do you sing? Let us hear it — or at least hear about it! 🎸 Do you play an instrument? What do you play? 🎨 Do you paint, draw, photograph, or create visual art? ✍️ Do you write — poetry, fiction, journaling, songwriting? 🌿 Do you garden? What are you growing right now? 🍳 Is the kitchen your creative space?

To every nursing student who found their way into this community — Welcome. I am so glad you are here. 💙 I want you to know something before you say a single word or ask a single question: You belong here. Fully. Exactly as you are right now — whether you are in your first semester trying to survive fundamentals, deep in the weeds of pharmacology at midnight, on your third clinical rotation wondering if you made the right choice, or somewhere in between all of those things at once. You belong here. This community is called the Nurses Sanctuary — and while many of our members are practicing nurses carrying the weight of years of clinical experience, this space is also for the nurses who are becoming. Who are in the middle of the most demanding, most disorienting, most transformative professional formation of their lives. That is you. And you deserve a space in this room. ✦ We have been where you are. ✦ We remember nursing school. The way it demanded everything — intellectually, physically, emotionally — while also requiring you to appear calm and competent when you felt none of those things. The way clinical rotations could be exhilarating and terrifying in the same five minutes. The way the self-doubt could arrive at 2 a.m. with the precision of someone who had been waiting for you to be alone and exhausted. We remember the questions we were afraid to ask because they felt too basic, or too obvious, or too personal, or too much like admitting that we did not have it all figured out. This post is your standing invitation to ask those questions. ✦ Ask a Nurse — No Question Too Small. No Question Too Big. ✦ This is an open floor. 💙 Ask about the clinical stuff — the skills, the concepts, the things that are not making sense no matter how many times you read the chapter. Ask about the emotional stuff — how to handle a difficult clinical rotation, how to process a patient death, how to manage the specific exhaustion of caring for people while also trying to learn how to care for people.

Let’s see those nursing school graduation pictures! 🎓💙 We don’t care if you had the big 70s & 80s hair, frosted bangs, feathered cuts, nursing hats, white stockings, or the cool new styles they have today 😂 Drop your graduation pic below and share: Graduation year Nursing school How long you’ve been a nurse We want to celebrate every era of nursing 🩺❤️