What Started As a Short Post…

I haven’t posted in quite a long time. In fact I think this is the longest time I’ve gone without posting. I’ll blame it on being busy with the Interim Executive Director job and putting my extra time into NaNoWriMo. I have been getting up at 5 so I can do my writing at the very beginning of the day when I am freshest and when my brain is (usually) the most open and receptive. It hasn’t always happened, a few days when I haven’t slept well, waking up from stress dreams that usually revolve around work issues that need to be grappled with, I have given myself a break and slept in and instead done my writing later in the day or on the weekend. Anyway, in addition to adjusting to being back at full time work, I am transitioning into a new position where I’m taking in a lot of information in a short amount of time so I can effectively transmit it to someone else coming into the job in a few months. There is not much written down so I especially want to make sure I capture things that happen at different times of the year so the new ED knows what to be aware of.  It’s a lot to take in and I want to do a good job keeping the organization moving forward at this time. As a result I am pretty wiped out by the end of the day. Other things that are contributing may be that daylight savings has ended and it’s dark at the end of the day, I’m getting used to being in an office in front of a computer most of the day and I’m learning about new people and ways of operating. The end result is I don’t have much energy left at the end of the day. I also feel like I haven’t had that much to write about. I don’t want to just be posting about the thoughts and stuff going through my head, it’s pretty repetitive right now, though I have had some interesting ideas some of which have been helping me reflect for my NaNoWriMo writing and I may include some of those in a later post. 

I have not been able to go out for walks as much, at least not the variety of places I’ve been able to go in the past so I don’t have a lot of pictures. I did spend last weekend house and dog sitting for Emmy in Concord. I had signed up to help out on a clean up project on Mt Diablo with Save Mt Diablo but I ended up canceling because I was worn out by the end of the week. Friday was Mee Mee’s last day and my last chance to suck as much information out of her brain as I could and that combined with the rain we had that week with more predicted for Saturday I was not up for the long drive up Mt Diablo and volunteering in the rain. Instead I spent the day hanging out with Winston, reading and doing some collaging which was just what I needed, a day that I didn’t have to do anything or go anywhere. Winston was content to sit at my feet and later in the day when the weather cleared up we got out for another walk around the neighborhood. That night I got caught up on The Man in the High Castle, an Amazon Prime show I had started a few years ago and hadn’t been able to finish.

When I was house and pet sitting at Kieran’s two weekends ago I watched a series about Tupac Shakur called Dear Mama on Hulu. I initially was interested in watching it because Tupac had attended my high school for a year. He was in the same class as one of my sisters, I had already graduated by that point. Part of the series included pictures and clips from my high school and several clips of him speaking as part of a documentary about urban kids in American schools. I was struck by what a deep thinking, intelligent person he was for a 17 year old. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that age who really thought so much and articulated so well concerns about problems in the community in that way. I’m sure at 17 I wouldn’t have even understood a lot of what he was talking about having lived a very different (and shallower) life. Then learning about how he grew up, his amazing mother, what his life was like and his wide variety of talents, just an incredible person. I knew so little about Tupac before, mainly that he was a rapper and was killed when he was young, but didn’t know the rest of his story. It just makes me so sad to think of someone who could have done so many incredible things with his talents in so many ways, especially with his leadership skills, his activism, his knowledge and way of presenting himself to the world. Wow.

It’s been hard to think about what I actually want to write about in the blog. I’ve said before I don’t want this blog to just be about the fun stuff I’ve done in my travels. But I haven’t been able to figure out how to say anything new or different about what I’m doing right now. It’s been an interesting transition, I’m learning about what I need for myself, about letting go of perfectionism when I’m in the midst of learning and just letting go of perfectionism in general. Of what it’s like to be a beginner in some aspects, while also bringing the experience that I do have. Finding my boundaries, learning to let go and be present. I find myself getting very ramped up as I’m trying to take all this information in, trying not to take on the stress and worry that others around me are feeling, to sort out what is important and what can wait or not have to be done at all, thinking about how I can provide benefit but not make changes that would be a problem for a new person coming in soon. Basically learning how to do the job of an interim ED. 

The work is bringing up so many different kinds of questions and ideas and at times I’m finding it very challenging to step back, be present in other parts of my life and to slow down. I seem to have two modes – on and off. I want more middle ground where I am present and aware but not on overdrive. So that’s going to be something I can learn as part of this time in my life. It’s made me reflect back to prior roles and see things from a different perspective, see how I was too hard on myself at times and how I could better have communicated with other people. Recognizing how my stress and burnout came about and figuring out what I need to do for myself to make sure that doesn’t happen again. I think I’ve developed a pretty good morning routine – I’ve realized that having space for myself in the morning to write and think and move  really sets me up for a good day. On one of my morning walks the sunrise was absolutely brilliant – so inspiring. I also know that taking a break in the middle of the day to walk around, physically move away from where I’m working, provides a way to refresh and have energy for the afternoon. I’m still working on figuring out how the end of the day will go. 

I recently saw a job posting that interested me. I haven’t really been looking for anything yet but I got an email from an organization that I’m on the mailing list for. I may have applied for a job there in the past, I’m not sure, but I’m interested in the work that they do. I saw they had a job opening and when I checked it out I thought ‘Hey that is something I’d like to do. I could bring my skills and abilities to that job’ and decided to apply. Yet, I’ve been so back and forth in my confidence levels of whether I could do that job. Sometimes my thinking was ‘Yes – I could do this and I have many skills that would be relevant to the job’ and other times it was ‘No – I have an outdated resume, am I too old, maybe they just want young people, or those with specific experience in that position, etc.’ I can tell the negative thinking happens when I’m feeling overwhelmed. I let the worry go and as often happens, the next day was better and the day after that I felt more on top of things and confident. I will never know if I don’t give it a shot, and applying will be a good experience regardless of the outcome. It did make me wonder if I should censor what I write in my blog. If any potential employer does research they would very likely find the blog. I’m not embarrassed about anything I have written – it’s not necessarily professional, polished writing, but it wasn’t meant to be. It’s my talking about what’s been going on, what I’ve been doing, the impact the changes in my life have had on me. I worry that employers may look at it and think ‘Oh, she might not be so committed because she’s taken this time off work’. I’ve seen that come up when I’ve been on interview panels. Now that I’ve had this experience I feel like I’m a lot more open and flexible about people’s career and life paths. Also knowing there is no guarantee that someone will come into a job and it will work out, they may have plans to stay in a job long term, but then life changes or the organization changes and that  person isn’t what the organization needs. That is part of what happened for me. I was ready to move on and do different things and the organization needed to have someone to come in with new ideas, perspectives, to do different things. For me, learning to live in uncertainty has been a great experience. I know that I can do it, I can find my way, be flexible, pick myself up if something doesn’t work and move ahead or to the side or move over. It’s not always about a straight forward march. I don’t necessarily want my life to be a series of achievements and milestones. I want my life to be broad with a lot of different experiences and not on one narrow path and if that means less certainty, less financial security, stability, ok. Of course I can say that now because I still have money in the bank, I’m in good physical and mental health. I know that can change at any time but I don’t want that fear to keep me where I am because it feels safer that way. 

Becoming more dependent on other people, like my Mom for giving me a place to live during this time, has been a good thing. I don’t have to do everything by myself, and it’s led me to question the way I ‘should’ be living my life. Living with my mom has deepened our relationship. I’ve become even more impressed with how she lives her life now, how she has lived it throughout her life, the adjustments she’s made to get to this place at the age of 88. We celebrated her birthday recently and there was so much laughter around the table. I’m envious of the group of friends that she spends time with most every day, many of whom she’s known for over 50 years! That is just incredible to me. I can see how the church has been such an integral part of her life and I wonder if it wasn’t there would she have done as well as she has since Dad died. Us kids are here and we can provide love and support, but it’s not the same as having peers who have gone through similar ups and downs. The church and her friends there provide a spiritual place to celebrate, grieve, praise and question. I don’t have anything like that in my life. I don’t necessarily want to join an organized religion, but would like to have a group of people I can spend time with in a deeper, more spiritual way, people outside of my family. I’ve had pockets of time where I’ve had close groups of friends – often relating to my schooling or my children’s schooling. But it’s hard to create a long term stable group, especially when I’ve been moving around and don’t have a specific community to plug into.

I was listening recently to a podcast about third spaces (places where the community in general can gather as opposed to homes and workplaces) and the lack of these third places in society today.  The loss of these third spaces have often occurred because there isn’t enough funding to sustain them. It is challenging to get funding for something if it is not going to create more wealth for the people who give the money. But that isn’t how things work in an inclusive community, that’s not how we can help create more equality in our world, how we can give people the support that they need, and cut down on the number of people who are really suffering, who through no fault of their own don’t have what they need to get by. I was reminded of a discussion during grad school with the President of the university. Those of us in the Masters of Nonprofit Administration (MNA) program were asking about the effect of the pandemic, including concerns about potential tuition increases and the reduced level of interaction that was part of the lure of that particular degree. The President was asked some pointed and challenging questions, which he responded to in a very inappropriate way, telling us to ‘Ask our MBA friends’, inferring that we don’t understand finances because we worked in the nonprofit sector. It was made even more shocking and depressing as this was a Jesuit university that was supposed to be based on values of supporting the downtrodden. While I am sure he was under a lot of pressure and was very worried about the university’s financial position, the fact that he so devalued a program that was not profit-oriented was so sad. His response made it less surprising when I found out a few months ago that the University was shutting down the MNA program, despite it having been around for decades, and was in fact the first of such programs in the country. 

Lol – I thought this was just going to be a short post about what I’ve been doing. Oh well. I hope it hasn’t been too boring or confusing. I promise the next one will be shorter!