The Driveway You Dread Is Building the Leader You're Becoming

For the case manager sitting in their car right now, convinced they made a mistake.

I want to talk to the person who is sitting in a parking lot. Maybe it's the hospital parking garage. Maybe it's a strip mall off the highway between your last visit and your next one. Maybe it's your own driveway, where you've been sitting for ten minutes because you're not ready to walk inside and be a person yet.

You know who you are.

You're the one who took the role — the new position, the stretch assignment, the opportunity that felt like the right next step — and discovered that right next step and ready are not the same thing. You're the one who is competent enough to know exactly how much you don't know yet. You're the one who has been crying more than you want to admit, in cars, in bathrooms, in the parking lots between point A and point B where no one can see you.

I was you.

I want you to know that before I say anything else.

When I transitioned into hospice case management, I came from an inpatient unit where the work was hard but shared. I had a team. I had people on both sides of me. When I buckled, there were hands.

Case management removed every single one of those hands.

Suddenly I was driving alone to houses I had never been inside, carrying full responsibility for everything that happened next. No unit behind me. No team a hallway away. Just me, a nursing bag, and whatever driveway I was pulling into.

I cried nearly every day.

I had a patient who needed a swallow evaluation. I wrote the order and moved on, the way I would have in my previous role — not knowing that in an assisted living facility, a swallow evaluation requires coordinating with an outside provider, a referral process I hadn't initiated because I didn't know it needed to exist. The facility called. Their tone was tired in the way of people who have had this conversation too many times. I hung up and sat in a parking lot and felt the particular shame of not knowing what I should have known.

I started trying to give away certain visits. I told myself it was logistics. It was dread.

The anxiety started before I got out of the car. I would sit there, reorganizing my bag, checking my phone, finding small reasons to delay the walk through certain doors by another thirty seconds.

And then one afternoon, it caught up with me entirely.

I was sitting in a parking lot — I don't remember which one, some errand I had stopped running when the weight of the day caught up with me — and I was sobbing. The kind that takes over your whole body before you have time to stop it.

I called my prior manager.

She was the one who had encouraged the transition, the one who believed the move to case management was right for me. I trusted her completely.

I asked her to let me come back.

Not as a question about the future. As a direct request — please, I can't do this, I made a mistake, let me come back to the unit.

There was a pause.

She acknowledged what I was feeling. She didn't minimize it or tell me the crying would stop. She validated the struggle without using it as evidence that I was right about myself.

And then she told me no.

She said she believed in me. That she had seen something I couldn't see from where I was sitting — not polish or readiness, but capacity. The kind that grows through discomfort when someone trustworthy stands close enough to keep you from disappearing.

She told me there would always be a safe place to land.

But I needed to fly.

I stayed.

Not because I felt better. Not because the doubt quieted or the driveways became easier. I stayed because someone I trusted looked at my worst moment and saw something other than what I saw.

That is not a small thing.

Confidence didn't arrive — it accumulated, slowly and unevenly, in the space between a hard decision and learning I had made the right one. I stopped needing to call as often. I stopped dreading the doors. I stopped giving away the visits.

And years later, I walked back into one of those assisted living facilities — not as the nurse who dreaded the door, but as the one who knew every regulation, every referral pathway, every unspoken expectation of the staff on the other side of it.

I walked in with a new nurse beside me.

She was reorganizing her bag in the parking lot. Finding small reasons to delay. I recognized the posture without her having to name it. I had worn it for months.

I didn't rush her.

I walked her through everything no orientation covers. The way the staff communicates. What they need from a hospice nurse that they will never ask for directly. The gap between what an order says and what the facility can actually execute, and how to bridge it.

I held her hand through the parts that had once broken me.

And I thought about the woman who had told me no in a parking lot.

She hadn't just built my confidence. She had built the version of me who could one day stand beside someone else's fear and recognize it — because I had once lived inside it — and say, without flinching:

I know this place. I've been lost here too.

Stay.

So if you are in the parking lot right now — I am not going to tell you it gets easier. I don't know your timeline, and that promise isn't mine to make.

What I will tell you is this:

The version of you who is struggling in this role right now is not the evidence that you made a mistake.

It is the raw material of the leader you are becoming.

The driveways that feel impossible today are the ones you will navigate blindfolded in three years. The regulations you don't yet understand are the ones you will walk a new nurse through someday with your hand steady on her back. The shame of not knowing will become the very thing that makes you the safest person in the room for someone who doesn't know either.

You cannot see that from a parking lot.

But I can see it from here.

There is always a safe place to land.

But first — you have to fly.