We're wrapping up the year at work, since Joe has made the somewhat rare decision to have our fiscal year match up with what the rest of the world also calls a year. So I'm going back over the reports and engagements and appointments and etc etc etc and I realize that some of the things I'm dealing with now are several months old. My first visit to the doctor in a long time was back on Augist 24th. That means at this point three months plus a couple weeks is the time that I've had to manage this crap. It feels like longer in some ways, but much shorter in others. What happened to 2010? Maybe that's part of the joke, I guess - I don't remember.
Yesterday was pretty rough, even though I usually like giving classes. I was invited to Emmaus Catholic Church in Lakeway to speak with their youth group about stewardship and money and things I've done a hundred times before. What I was told to prepare for was a small classroom of 20-30 kids, but I was greeted with a stage and a stadium seating room full of much, much more. I enjoy being on stage, I don't worry about getting up in front of large crowds, but suddenly the few handouts and talking points I had felt painfully short of the bar. It affected me deeply - I was invited to go to a friend's house later that night but all I could really do was show up, take up space, and excuse myself to leave when I realized that the little raincloud over my head was plain for all to see.
Sometimes I wonder if I've gotten everything out of this job that I'm going to get. We do a lot of community work and we go to events and little dinners where organizations like mine are recognized, but it often only serves to try and make me feel like the company is epically dwarfed by the efforts of others. Other groups who have small armies of counselors, celebrate opening a new community center, talk about how their new TV and radio campaign is going, and so on. Do we make a difference, really? Are we small enough that if the company, and me with it, vanished from the face of Austin, would the folks we would have served or spoken with simply go somewhere else?
Perhaps. I think our counseling is more of that, but our outreach really does deal with some groups that no one else is talking to. Maybe that's why yesterday hit me so hard yesterday - the work that subconciously I've decided is what we do that has the real impact was done wrong. People are telling me that it couldn't have gone as bad as I'm saying, which is possible, but I don't think that was really the point.
