Open any nursing textbook. Any nursing magazine. Any nursing-related marketing material. Tell me what the nurses in those images look like.
Thin. Young. Smiling. Usually white, sometimes a token nod to diversity. Always in spotless scrubs. Always in a stock-photo hallway with a stock-photo stethoscope, looking compassionately at a stock-photo patient who is also smiling.
If that's not what you look like — if you're plus-sized, or 50, or brown, or Black, or have a visible disability, or have a chronic illness, or are male in a female-coded field, or have tattoos, or have a name people mispronounce, or wear hijab, or use a wheelchair, or are trans, or are anything at all that the marketing department did not put in the brochure — this letter is for you.
The textbook is not the profession. The textbook is the marketing. You are the profession.
Who Actually Nurses
I have worked alongside, learned from, and been saved by nurses who looked nothing like the brochure. The 62-year-old Filipino nurse who taught me how to read a patient's eyes before they could even tell me what was wrong. The 6'3" Black man on the cardiac floor who could de-escalate a confused, swinging patient with a softness I have never been able to replicate. The pregnant nurse who ran a code in her last trimester. The nurse with chronic pain who walked the floor through her own bad days because she'd promised her patients she'd be there.
This is what nursing actually is. It is not the brochure. The brochure is a fiction sold to people who haven't worked the floor.
What the Brochure Costs You
Here's the harm of the brochure. When you don't see yourself in it, you start to believe — even if you can't say it out loud — that you don't really belong. That you got in by some technicality. That you are less of a "real" nurse than the people in the picture.
That feeling is a lie that the picture is telling you. But the lie does real work. It makes you second-guess yourself in clinical. It makes you keep your head down when you could speak up. It makes you accept treatment from preceptors and patients and colleagues that you would never tolerate if you knew, in your bones, that you belonged.
So let me say it now: you belong. You belong because you can do this work. The work is the qualification. Nothing else.
To the Plus-Sized Nurse
You've heard the comments. You will hear more. Patients will say things. Coworkers will make assumptions. Someone will hand you a "wellness" pamphlet you didn't ask for. None of it is a reflection of your competence. None of it changes what you can do for patients.
The bodies that show up to this work are all kinds of bodies. The work is bigger than any one body.
To the Older Nurse
You came to nursing later. Maybe you raised kids first. Maybe you had a whole other career. Maybe you finally listened to the voice that had been calling you for 25 years. Whatever the path, you bring something into this profession that 23-year-old new grads cannot: lived experience. Patients trust you faster. Families lean on you. You have already been a person in the world, and that makes you a better nurse, not a worse one.
To the Nurse of Color
You probably already know that you'll have to navigate things your white colleagues won't. The patient who asks for a "different" nurse. The colleague who can't pronounce your name and won't try. The microaggressions that pile up over the course of a shift. The pressure to be twice as good for half the credit.
I cannot make that go away. But I can tell you that the nursing students of color I have mentored have, without exception, been some of the most thorough, careful, perceptive clinicians I've worked with. You are not getting through this in spite of who you are. You are getting through it because of who you are.
To the Male Nurse
Yes, you're outnumbered. Yes, people will assume you're the doctor. Yes, you'll get asked to lift things. You are also bringing something that nursing has long needed — a presence that's quietly redefining what care looks like and who delivers it. Stay.
To the Nurse with a Chronic Illness
You are doing this work while also doing the work of managing your body. That is two full-time jobs. You may have to advocate for accommodations. You may have to rest in ways your colleagues don't understand. None of that makes you less of a nurse. It makes you a nurse who knows, in a way most don't, what it actually feels like to be on the other side of the bed.
Truth: Some of the most extraordinary nurses I've ever known were the ones the stock photographers never thought to put in the picture.
What to Do When You Don't See Yourself
Find the nurses who do look like you. They are out there. On Instagram, in your hospital, in your community. Follow them. Reach out. Let yourself be reminded that the profession is bigger than the brochure.
If you can't find them — be them. Be the visible nurse for the future student who needs to see herself somewhere. Be the photograph that someone else didn't have when she was deciding whether to apply to nursing school.
I know that feels like a lot to ask. But your existence in this profession is not just for you. It's for every kid who is going to come behind you and need to know that nursing has a space for them too.
One More Thing
If you've spent any amount of time wondering whether you're "really" cut out for this — please stop. The wondering is not evidence of anything except that you've been looking at the wrong pictures.
You belong here. Not someday. Not after you lose weight or learn to mask your accent or hide your tattoos. Now. The you who is currently reading this is the nurse the profession needs.
Walk in with your head up tomorrow. Wear your tattoos. Eat your lunch. Speak your name the way it's actually pronounced. Take the credit you've earned. Take the space you have a right to.
The brochure is wrong. You're right. The work knows you. Trust it.