Leaving and Cleaving : Do goodbye always suck?

I used a big word today: Kaleidoscope. 

If I were to play 4 pictures and one word, that would be my word for today. That would be the word that Grammarly would most likely flag in my vocabulary today. I feel many things today, things that I didn't expect to feel, things that I have to allow myself to feel even though I know everyone has passed round a list of expected feelings and thoughts that they expect me to choose from.

 Picture1: My last office mate and I. Picture 2: My first office mates and I.

Today is my last day at a job I have had for 3 years and 3 months. Actually, 3 years, 3 months, and 8 days when I began work there.

3 years of highs and lows, questioning myself, wondering, and second-guessing. 3 years of stumbling, learning,  success and becoming good at what I do. 3 years of earning my stripes and asserting myself to myself. For 3 years I have loved, I have worked, I have learned, I have grown, I have invested my life, and today, it all comes to an end.

There were days I dreaded going into the office because of the load of work I left behind. While on other days I was really excited to slay what was left of the dragon of yesterday. 

I don't know how people feel when they are asked to leave a job because nobody really talks about it. Everyone knows how everyone feels when you get a new job because everyone talks about it.

For me I feel many things, I guess my temperament evaluation was spot on. 

Of all these many things, I am deciding to pick and choose my narrative.

First I am grateful for life, I lost two very dear colleagues in these 3 years. Sometimes I still cry when I think of their families, what they could have been. How they would have cooked up a storm in this lockdown period. How one would have gotten married and probably had a kid or two by now. I was blessed to cook both edible and inedible things. I was privileged to get married. Now we refer to them in past tense. 

I am grateful that I am clearer about the situation of GIS in the big picture, it's not only a tool like Excel even though like Excel whether you use it for it's calculation function or you use it for modelling it's dependent on many things including the task at hand.

Secondly, I am grateful for the skills and competencies I have built. Due to the way I enjoy life, I don't always seem to be able to sit still and listen. Do not be fooled I heard you, my guys can attest to the fact that one of the greatest challenges of an R, M&E professional especially one that works in a role that makes you combine many skills at the same time is that you can be so focused on documenting other people's work that you forget to document your own. Across the states we support, I learned to listen for the things that failed to make the written reports. 

The hidden nuggets covered in single lines and phrases. Those were things I enjoyed searching for during monthly report reviews. Some of them made it to the write-up stage, others made it into the documents highlighting our key interventions.

I never used to play hide and seek a lot as a child but I honestly enjoyed looking through rows and columns of data looking for outliers. Sometimes they may be nothing, but like we always say if you query the data well enough, it will confess. 

I love to travel and growing up I would not sleep a night before a trip, the excitement was always too much to waste on sleep. As an adult, I only sleep because the thought of missing my flight because I slept off in the airport lobby gives me the chills. Working and traveling and not just sitting behind a desk to suggest something, but following the idea to the last mile and sometimes experiencing it's obstacles first hand is something I am grateful for.

Watching a first time mother lose her baby in the delivery room because of myths and misconceptions about a cesarean section made me know that I had something to give to the health sector. In the last 3 years and 3 months, through analysis, presentations, data reviews and feedback on how the program can be more accurate in addressing the needs of the communities that we are privileged to serve. Alongside a team of brilliant passionate people, we have given one more woman, the opportunity to choose when, and how she wants to plan her life. We have made those conversations easier,  services more humane, and empowered health systems to properly deliver the right kind of service. As I transition into all the things that lie ahead, I will always be grateful for all the women that I will never meet that choose to secure their future.

VUCA conversations prepared us for this, the future of work is less rigid. Easing into working at specific times and on specific days is an experience I look forward to immensely because all I can see is a new thing to learn,

more travel time, more adventure time, and more time for hosting and photography. Everything that has a beginning, has an end. This is a beginning and also an end. I am truly grateful.