A Letter to Nurses in BC. The Weight Beneath the Pride.

May 11, 2026 – May 17, 2026 Nurses Week always brings up a mix of feelings for me. There’s pride of course, and deep respect for the work, but if I’m being honest there’s also a quiet heaviness that comes with it. The kind that doesn’t always get spoken out loud. 

Before I was a therapist, I was a nurse, and I still recognize that look. The one that says you’ve got it, you’re reliable, people can count on you. But underneath that, there’s usually more: tiredness that doesn’t fully go away, a constant pressure, and the weight of carrying things that no one else really sees.

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I Know This Role From the Inside I know what the role carries because I lived it. I know what its like to walk into a shift already bracing yourself for what might come. I know what it means to hold steady in moments that should shake you, to be the calm in someone else’s crisis while quietly setting your own needs aside. There’s a kind of strength that nursing asks of you, but it’s not the loud, visible kind. It’s steady, contained, and often invisible. People see the competence. They see how much you can handle. But they don’t always see the cost of that.

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What the Research Tells Us

And the cost is real. A large study of nearly 4,000 nurses across British Columbia found that many are experiencing symptoms of anxiety, depression, and even trauma. Rates of anxiety and depression were higher than what we typically see in the general population, and many nurses reported symptoms consistent with PTSD, something we don’t often associate with healthcare, but maybe we should. What stood out even more is that this wasn’t random. Nurses working in more strained environments, where workloads were heavier and support was lower, reported significantly worse mental health. Not because they were less capable, but because they were being asked to carry more, often without enough support to do so sustainably.

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What Makes Nursing Uniquely Heavy What makes nursing uniquely heavy isn’t just the workload, though that’s certainly part of it. It’s the responsibility of being the one who catches what others might miss. It’s the emotional labour of supporting patients and families through some of the hardest moments of their lives. It’s the moral tension of knowing what care should look like and not always being able to provide it in the way you want to. It’s the constant anticipating, adapting, and managing, often while also being the “strong one” in your life outside of work. That kind of weight doesn’t just disappear at the end of a shift.

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What I See in the Therapy Room Now, as a therapist, I sit with nurses on the other side of the room, and what strikes me most is how rarely they come in saying, “I’m struggling.” More often, it sounds like, “I’m just tired,” or “I should be able to handle this,” or “Other people have it worse.” There’s a minimizing that happens, a quiet pushing down of what’s actually hard. But underneath that, I often see a kind of disconnection from self, a lingering sense of not being enough, and nervous systems that haven’t had a real chance to settle in a very long time. And maybe the hardest part is that many nurses feel like they shouldn’t need support at all.

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What I Want You to Know So let me say this clearly, in case no one has said it to you in a while: what you’re feeling makes sense. You are not weak for feeling this way, and you are not failing. There is nothing wrong with you for being impacted by the weight you carry. You are responding in a human way to a very demanding role.

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Three Things I Hope You Take With You There are a few things I hope you take with you from this, even after this week passes.

Your experience makes sense. If you've been more tired, more on edge, more numb, or just not quite like yourself lately, that doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It means something has been heavy for a while. And you've been carrying it.

You don't have to earn support. I know how easy it is to keep going, to tell yourself you can handle it, to downplay what's hard because that's what you've always done. But you don't have to earn support by reaching a breaking point. You're allowed to need it in the middle of things, while you're still holding it together.

You are more than this role. Nursing can take up so much space that it starts to feel like it's all there is. But there is still a whole person underneath the shifts, the responsibility, and the constant holding of others. You're still there. And you matter, too.

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I See You

If you take anything from this, I hope it’s this: I see you. Not just the capable, dependable version of you that shows up every shift, but the full you, the one carrying the weight, the responsibility, the quiet exhaustion, and still continuing on. 

You matter. And you don’t have to carry all of this alone.