It has been over a year since my last blog post. Yesterday, I graduated Green Corps in what has surely concluded one of if not the most difficult year of my life. The challenges I've faced on a professional and personal level have pushed me more than I thought possible. I am a new person, someone who I am not ashamed to admit to having dreamed about becoming. I am skilled, confident and ready to take on whatever challenge lays out before me. I am sociable, outgoing, adventurous and a shameless romantic. I am political, engaging, and yes, even radical. I am not ashamed to say I am a progressive who wants to work with others to solve the entangled web of interconnected issues we are facing and have a lot of fun while doing it. This is said with it being noted that none of the aforementioned would I have been willing to confidently identify with just a year ago.
I'm about to transition into a new chapter of my life-- I have been hired to be the Associate Organizing Representative for the Sierra Club Beyond Coal campaign in Denver, Colorado. I am so thrilled to be able to go out there and fully invest myself into a community and work directly in developing the leaders that will take us to a sustainable future.
The next few weeks to months are going to be a hard transition. A metaphor I found myself explaining the way I have felt the last few weeks is like that of a mirror-- in the last several months it has cracked in several places--- cracked by the challenges I faced with working on Green Corps campaigns, cracked by the growing disconnect from high school and college friends, cracked from life challenges of friends and family and finding a balance to be there for them while keeping up my needs, and the final, major crack, was the death of my father in June which has left me, as many who lose a parent, in a small existential crisis. It was all I could do to hold the mirror together for the last few months bearing the weight of these coming-of-age challenges to finally have it shatter altogether, completing a challenging chapter of my life. Now, though, comes the exciting and terrifying time to piece together the remaining shards into a new frame, a blank canvass. Through the reflection of these shards I will start to write out my thoughts of the last 13 months of my life in a series of postings over the next several weeks.
But before I start reflecting on this past chapter, I must head to sleep as the winds of a fading tropical storm Irene tussle the trees outside the screen door in the darkness of night. At last, though, I am at a place I can blog.
