Personal Positives: @agrrud on Day One

I’d like to welcome Maia as a guest poster to The Conversationalist sharing her thoughts on this month’s Down Under Feminists’ Carnival theme, “Personal Positives‘. Maia is dear to me and it is truly a pleasure to host her candid and introspective post here as part of the carnival. 

Today was the first… 

Today is a lot of firsts. 

I left a relationship a couple of months ago, the weekend before I started my new job. Today my new job took me to another town. I have a serviced apartment in the city, an allowance, a flight home each weekend.  Inside my backpack – the largest I could sneak on the plane – lay a coiled string of fairy lights: a home making device. 

The company I work for prides itself on its culture. I chose it for that. When I came out of my my post-PhD stupor and actually paid some mind to my life again, I wanted three things in equal measures: highly technical work; among diverse, open-minded, fascinating, socially capable people; at an 0rganisation whose values I love and respect. 

I wanted to be part of a community. 

I am an engineer. A scientist. No, an engineer. All of the above. These are some of the things I am, certainly. Now I work in software. They’ve employed me, this organisation full of wonder and generosity, to break things. They trusted my sense in the world, though my software ability is rudimentary and out of date. 

Back home, where I’ll be spending weekends, I have a life so full I can barely devote the requisite 40 hours a week to work. Where did it go, the time? Me of the past slogged eighty-, hundred-hour weeks at a thesis. Past me drove into town at 10pm on Saturdays, struggling through post-football traffic, to run long, boring, finicky experiments, week after week. I still work that hard, but when the work itself dried up, I shoved things into its absence. Friends, lovers, committees, science talks, acrobalance classes. Being in this new place will be good; I want to devote more time to learning how to give in this field.

A car arrived at my door this morning, at an hour so early I can only assume it’s imaginary. I was driven to the office when I landed. Meetings. Coffee. Whiteboards. Access card forms. Do we know who the knowledge experts on this project are right now? How about the success criteria? Maybe tomorrow, when the vital person is back, we can run through a few scenarios.
We are consultants, here to test their systems. I am learning how the labyrinthine tools work, much less the client’s infrastructure. I have a mentor. I’ll figure it out. I’m smart and capable.
We traverse this world, my heartache and I, and learn. No day is a standalone. Day One is one of a continuum – a community of days, if you will.

My mentor and I will be working closely. We discussed our communication styles today, our strengths and weaknesses. We gave each other permission to be pulled up when we stray from the path of usefulness.

My life is…amazing. The opportunities I have are tremendous. I live in a bubble. My friends, my lovers, now my colleagues – all think big. All have at least some awareness of their own bigotry, and work to correct it. My life contains kindness, intelligence, challenge, generosity. I encourage it wherever I can. I have money and time and love and friends and things and access. I am spoilt.

I remind myself, and the world around me, that this is luxury.

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