Tuesday, December 14, 2010

December 14: Appreciate

I'm participating in #reverb10, a month-long challenge to blog every day of December based on prompts provided here.

Prompt: Appreciate What’s the one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year? How do you express gratitude for it? (Author: Victoria Klein)

Photo by Andrew Coulter Enright.

A few months ago, I was going through files on my computer and came across my “Job Hunt” folder; full of awful hopeless days hunched over the dining room table, dead-end interviews and flakey HR people. That folder has so many personalized resumes, cover letters and writing tests and samples. That folder is solely responsible for my butterflyish excitement every time my cell phone rang – could it be someone calling me to offer me a job or interview? Or was it my grandparents calling again wondering why a girl “so smart” couldn’t find a job? That folder was seven months of my life.

I appreciate my job every day, and if you are a human being who has lived on this earth sometime over the past two or three years, I don’t have to explain to you why. Furthermore, this is a job I actually wanted, one that helps me build my skill set and get me to the places I want to go. Those seven months weren’t wasted. They made me awesome at interviews and made me appreciate even more when I found one that was absolutely the perfect fit.

If I could answer this question twice, the second thing I appreciate greatly is my youth. How many 24 year olds do you know who have great jobs that align with their career goals? How many 24 year olds do you know who can siphon money off each month for a future vacation to the other side of the world? I love being young, how flexible my future is, where I’m going and who I will be when I get there.

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