What do you hope to achieve this year?

Cassandra | Te Tai Poutini

Grace is focused on finding balance in her life after a period of change and study, aiming to build stronger relationships, settle into familiar spaces, and fully appreciate the present.

“With Covid I was grounded and didn’t have any work and I made decisions that I wanted to go back and study so I returned to Auckland and studied nursing. So I’m a nurse now. I work up in Grey at Te Nīkau Hospital there.

It’s a hard job. It’s hard in the sense that there’s always the intellectual element of what’s going on, what’s changing, and what people need. A lot of bells and sounds and all the things going on make it tiring, but I really like people and I like caring for them, so it feels like a very good fit for me.

I think my whole hope and focus is to focus on doing my job really well, building more good relationships in this community, and developing more of a friendship base. It’s been a few years of study and settling into a lot of change, which has felt turbulent, fun, exciting, and stressful.

Now, I feel like I’m coming into a place where I can find balance again and return to not just surviving but thriving, instead of constantly looking at textbooks or navigating new spaces.

I want to settle into a known space, find familiarity in those new spaces, feel grounded, and fully appreciate everything in a more present way instead of feeling like a headless chicken at times.”