I’m in the final stretch, you know? Night classes for this nursing degree, after two decades on the factory floor. My hands are used to grease and metal, not charting and meds. Everyone back home, my aunties, my parents, they’re so proud. “Our smart girl, leaving the factory dust behind.” Yeah, right. I barely scraped through high school, barely passed my citizenship test. Now I’m supposed to be some brainiac, a healer? This final licensing exam... it’s a monster. I look at the study guides, the dense paragraphs, and my eyes just glaze over. It’s like reading a foreign language, even though it's English. My English is fine for the shop floor, for talking shit with the guys, for yelling at my kids. But for this? This *academic* shit? Forget about it. It’s not just the words. It’s the way they think, the way they expect you to think. Everything’s so... clean. So organized. My brain’s a jumbled mess of shifts, family drama, trying to remember what specific prayer my grandmother would say when someone was sick. I remember *that* detail, but can I remember the difference between a distal and proximal artery? Nah. My family, they think I'm gonna be a hero, doctor-adjacent. They’re already talking about me sponsoring cousins, sending money back home for new roofs. It’s a lot of weight, you know? All this pressure, and I’m pretty sure I’m gonna fail. I just know it. I can feel it in my gut, that familiar dread. Sometimes I just laugh. Like, out loud, alone in my kitchen at 2 AM. What a joke. What a setup. Me, a nurse. Me, with a degree. The factory floor was honest, at least. You screwed up, you saw it right there, a bent piece of metal, a bad weld. Here, I screw up, someone could... well. Shit. And I’m too old for this. Too tired. Too dumb. All those years, all that money, all this hope... for what? Another failure. Maybe I should just call in sick for the exam. Just not show up. Tell everyone I got laid off. Easier that way. God, it’s easier to be the failure everyone expects.