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Life-Lessons Learned From Working At A Nursing Home Aged 19
How a youngling could learn important lessons from the elderly!
Life was good when I was nineteen. I was the ultimate goth teen with an amazing girlfriend and no real worries. Then I started working at a nursing home, for a year. Things changed drastically.
When you’re young and you’re lucky enough to come from a somewhat stable, wealthy family, you don’t have many problems really — except the ones you make yourself.
Back in the day (we’re talking the nineties here), my worries consisted of waiting for the next game release, getting worried when my girlfriend didn’t text me for fourtyfive minutes straight and keeping my eyeliner out of my eyeballs. Life truly was good, and simple.
I always had a social side in me (even if people who know me closely, might beg to differ) so it was only logical for me to spend a semi-voluntary year in a nursing home. My job was supposed to help the old folks around, play chess with them and support the professional caregivers.
The nursing home was about to move locations, as it was old and worn down. The new location, luckily, was just a few hundred meters away. I went into this with all the enthusiasm in the world. I didn’t have real expectations and yet, things were quite different than I would have expected…
