Wednesday, June 30, 2010

the thing is it's not like i set out to find my 9 year relationship.

i think that's what people forget. zach just hasn't allowed me to fall out of love with him. it makes him quite impressive. i'm not sure many guys have that kind of stamina.
i felt philosophical today and was talking to my new bestie, alix (shout out!) about (what do girls talk about?): relationships. when you fall in love at 19 and then cultivate that for 9 years, each day is a surprise. there was nothing about the first three even four years that said FOREVER to me. it was simple, i was in love with zach and each day i kept loving him. nine years later and it still, luckily, feels relatively simple. i love him. he makes each day a little special for me. it's rarely big gestures. zach's not a big gesture guy. it's him saying a sentence that i never expected to hear or doing some kind of crazy dance in the living room that makes me think that no one else in the world has ever done that dance. a lot of the time i take all of this 9 yearishness for granted. i think, "zach never does dishes, i bet there's a guy out there that does dishes." i bet i could find that too. if dishes were the most important thing in my life (or even in the top 20) i'd be miserable. but i'm not.
on valentines day in year two of our relationship part of my present was "monster mad libs." he got me mad libs. no reason. it's not like we had some sort of "mad lib" joke that made them significant, he just saw them and in a panic added them to his purchase. it was ridiculous and i thought, "any other guy would have more sense than to do this." turns out thats one of my fav. zach stories and maybe it took me too many years to realize this, but i fundamentally don't want "any other guy." i can't handle it. the idea of a remotely traditional guy grosses. me. out. i'm too sensitive to that feeling of, "oh. you're doing THAT thing. that thing that you probably saw on Dr. Phil or read in some magazine or heard from some friend or saw in some movie."
i've always felt different about everything as it relates to "love" and "romance." i just can't fit in to anything i feel like i'm "supposed" to fit into. i never thought about what would happen at my wedding, felt totally terrified of my first kiss, and didn't really even "date" before I met zach. i'm awkward. i'm too self-aware to let anybody do anything remotely traditional with me without acknowledging that it's typical and that i realize that it's typical out loud. so how does this work? the first week zach and i were dating i went to kiss him and after three seconds he pulled back and loudly said, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" and then laughed at how funny he was. and i thought it was hilarious too. and i still do.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

is the easy choice always the bad choice?

Things got weird this week.

1) I got a full-blown head/chest cold in June after not being sick at all this year.

2) A totally unexpected position+benefits was resurrected at my work and I was told if I wanted it there was a 90% chance it could be mine.

Both of these things totally surprised me. Maybe most people feel like they deal in surprises all the time but I find that I'm rarely caught totally unawares. I'm one of those "lets-imagine-every-possible-scenario-and-prepare" kind of people so when something happens that blindsides me I fumble to figure out how I feel about this unexpected situation. I have a hard time reacting immediately to something and trusting that reaction. I want to analyze, look at things from all sides, and then deliver my thoughts. I hate feeling rushed into decisions.

So this new position at work was available like 3-4 months ago and then went away when priorities shifted within the organization. Suddenly, after some recent board meetings, the job came back. Since I've made my desire to stay abundantly clear, my bosses' bosses' boss (yep. it's like that) pulled me into her office, said, "hey, remember how we were going to talk about that part-time position? well that's gone. we're not doing that. good news is now there's this new one and, if you're interested in it, we'd be interested in you doing it." This new job is pretty far removed from what I was doing before. It's much more behind the scenes and I'd have a new supervisor and would be learning new software to do it. BUT (and hopefully it's a big but) there's supposed to be a lot more flexibility in it since they've unearthed it. Before it was pretty intense with data analysis, but I was told I'd get to mold it a little to suit the skills I've been building (namely facilitating conversations with nonprofits in the community and getting to work with organizations all over Central Texas that serve youth). I really like the work I've been doing and I'm attached to seeing it succeed. It would be hard to leave it entirely.

Most of that probably wasn't especially interesting to anyone but me. All of that background is just to say that now I'm faced with a choice to work in a new area, one I feel strays a little bit from what I'm passionate about. My question is: do I take this position because it allows me to stay in an organization I know and still contribute to work I care about if in a new, more backstage way OR do I go out into the world and seek a career that meets my desire to be out and about collaboratively creating change?


Friday, June 4, 2010

I've lately been learning a lot about myself. This has largely been coming from an increasingly challenging work situation. Challenging in that it may not be my work situation for much longer. If you know me, you know that I have approximately eight positions listed on my resume covering the six years I've been out of college. Some factors outside of my control play into this:

1) I moved from Missouri to Illinois back to Missouri to Texas since college.
2) Several of these jobs were made to be temporary. Two were contract positions coordinating volunteers for festivals and two more were based around me being a student at the university. Once I stopped being a student the funding ran out quickly.

That said, I'm back in situation two more or less. My Americorps VISTA term is up next month. I knew it was a year long deal when I signed on, but from day one I decided I was going to make them want me to stay when it was over. Because of this (and in true nonprofit fashion) I worked twice as hard, took on twice as much work, and made twice as many friends around the office in an attempt to make myself irreplaceable. And it worked. Sort of. If you know nonprofit work you know that jobs are dependent on grants. And they were able to get funding for a position through a grant BUT it's only covers a part-time employee. So the clock is ticking. I have one month to cast my net even wider and try to find twelve more hours somewhere in some department to get myself there with benefits.
I worked on my resume tonight as the first step towards accepting a possible job hunt inevitability. It's getting tough to fit everything on there. I find myself deleting software from my "skills" section that I no longer remember how to use and taking out some of the padding I put in years ago when I only had one job to my name.

So what am I learning? That I'm much more valuable than the eight jobs on my resume suggest. That, because I adore the righteousness of nonprofit work, I am willing to keep running to new challenges in an effort to help the most people with the most need. This is why I want to stay at United Way. There is so much potential to reach so many people. But I know that if they can't find funding to keep me on a full-time/benefits basis that I'll have to leave. I'm 28 years old. I am an extremely hard worker when I am passionate about the work I am doing. I am creative and innovative and kind. And if I have to, I can find passion elsewhere. And do a damn good job.