There's something about medical work that drains you in ways people don't understand. I used to think caring was this noble thing. Now I know it's just emotional extraction.
In nursing, you're expected to give everything. Every shift is a performance of compassion where your actual feelings don't matter. You learn to smile through twelve-hour rotations while your body aches and your emotional reserves hit zero. I remember nights where I'd finish a shift and just sit in the hospital carpark, totally hollowed out.
The NHS doesn't care about nurses. They talk about vocation but what they mean is: work for cheap, work till you break. My last year was all burnout. Constant understaffing. Patients who were genuinely suffering. Doctors who treated us like administrative robots.
Sex work, ironically, feels more honest. Here I choose my emotional labour. I decide my boundaries. My clients know they're purchasing intimacy, not exploiting my fundamental human capacity for empathy. There's a clinical clarity to this that nursing never had.
Some days I miss the medical precision. The charting. The clean lines of professional touch. But not enough to go back.