A year and a half ago, I walked into my brand new boss’s office, a little bit nervous. Ok, terrified. Sitting in your boss’s office still felt like sitting in the principal’s’s office at school. That had never happened to me before, but I felt as though the churning in my stomach, the unbelievable amount of sweat that was soaking through my shirt and my inability to keep my hands still was probably the reaction I would’ve had if I had ever been called into the principal’s office.
Except I wasn’t called in there to be berated or talked down to. What he wanted was much more innocuous and much more terrifying. “What do you want to get out of your time here at the Center?” He asked me. Well, gee. I wasn’t actually really in good practice at thinking about what I wanted out of life, much less what I wanted in this particular job. No, that’s not right. I had talked to Charles about wanting to start a project to support new teachers, something that could fill in the gaps that 4 years of college education couldn’t even hope to begin to fill. But was this something that I could tell my new boss? After all, I was just a front desk worker, essentially. Putting together guides and copying; collating and answering phones. I looked up at him and thought, why not? He seems genuinely interested enough.
So I told him. I told him what I thought we needed to do for new teachers and why. What I thought we could do to help and how I could be a part of it. And what did he say? Not, oh, that’s nice and then politely usher me out of his office. Not even, that’s a pretty good idea, let me give it to someone who is obviously more qualified. He said, “That’s a great idea. Go for it.”
And I did.
So it’s now one year and three months since that first meeting when he gave me, some newly graduated 22 year old office assistant, full reign to develop a brand new program. And after a year and three months, which included one boss dying, three coworkers quitting/getting fired, thousands of pages of reading, hundreds of drafts of program plans, one giant move to the Science Center, and countless hours of desperation and anxiety ridden days (and dreams), it looks like the idea that began as a thought in my mind is becoming a fully fledged and funded program brought together by two major organizations and backed by a major corporation.
I had all these people around me, my boss, Charles, my co-workers, random people I barely knew, who trusted me. Who believed in my idea. And because they trusted me and believed in me, even (though it’s cliche) when I didn’t believe in myself, now it’s not just an idea. It’s a living, breathing program. And whether it becomes as big and widely used as we talked about in today’s meeting or fizzles out in three years, I just want to remember this moment. People believed in me and even though it was probably misplaced at the time, it isn’t now. No, I didn’t scale Everest or cure cancer or write the next great American novel or lead a triumphant battle. But, I did manage to tackle something that was completely terrifying to me, completely foreign and succeed. I fully believe in toasting whatever successes and victories we manage to have in our small lives and the people that we share them with. So here’s to me, I guess. Here’s to seeing what I can do when I stop being so afraid to fail. But, more importantly, here’s to Chris, who put his trust in some quiet girl that answered the phones. Here’s to SaraJayne, who didn’t take my tears as a sign that I couldn’t do something. Here’s to Charles, who read through proposals and budgets and bulletted lists of ideas even when he had 75 pages of Tort reading ahead of him. I know that there are many, many failures out there ahead of me. But today, today I want to celebrate what happens when things work out and be thankful for the people who always thought it would.
