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Goal Statement
Goal Statement
Mesa, AZ
(928) 632-3922
Avascarbrough@arizona.edu
Dear, HonorHealth,
To understand why I wanted to become a nurse comes from my past inability to help my
mother when she needed it the most. As a child your only expectation is that your mother will
take care of you and for me my narrative was flipped my mother would drink herself to sleep
while I picked up the house and put my sisters to sleep, but even at a young age I knew that
something had happened with my mother from the time I was born to 5th grade her own trauma
had caught up to her and she started self medication with drugs and alcohol. My mother has a
substance use disorder. It was hard for me to grasp at first, how my mother wanted so little to do
with her life that she would tune the world out with substance and during that time all I wanted
was to help.
When my mother first went to rehab, I was in 8th grade. I remember feeling so small and
insignificant to the world around me, and afraid. I knew nothing of her disease and I wanted so
much to be able to help her. I remember reading the vials on the drugs she would inject, I would
research adverse symptoms and try to help her the best I could. This left me to care for my sisters
as my own, furthering my love for children. As her disease progressed into heroin her mental
health started to catch up, she ended up in drug induced psychosis with multiple different
diagnoses of bipolar. The nurses that treated my mother during this time made me want to be a
nurse and not in the traditional way, I wanted to be a nurse so that I would never treat patients in
the way she was treated. They seemed to have no empathy for her disease and no empathy for
her as a person at all; they only saw her as an addict, they didn't see her as my mother who
needed help that I could not give her. From this ongoing and painful experience, I have become
the person I am today. A person who wishes to succeed in my journey to finish nursing school
and to not only survive, but to thrive in my own life. I would say my mother's best lesson to me
was in helping me develop the ability to overcome my hardships and use them to fuel me toward
positive success in my life. My time in school has accelerated my passion for nursing. Each new
thing I learn helps me contribute to the care I give. I want to be a psychiatric pediatric nurse
more than anything because it combines my passions of caring for children, spreading the
awareness of addiction, and stopping it before it takes over a person's life like it did my mothers.
I know wherever my placement is, my strongest quality of empathy will still shine through and