Perspective

There's nothing like a farewell event in your honour to make you feel appreciated. I had my "mugging" today at work - given its strange name for the practice of giving the departing employee a pottery mug that bears their name, as well as the institutional logo.

I have often felt inadequate in this job. It quickly became apparent to me when I began that this job required an awful lot of extroversion. Turns out, I'm predominantly introverted. My administrative gifts were definitely well-used here and I quickly found my niche in the disability service area and took a lot of pride in what I was able to drive here. But there was always that nagging sense that I wasn't doing a very good job in the biggest part of my job, the commuter program.

Standing in a room today and having the Dean of Social Sciences stand up to thank me, on behalf of the faculty, for my work with students with disabilities was pretty remarkable. So also was the heartfelt thanks of our Vice President of Finance for my work with the student employment program. He's a tough cookie who questions everything and intimidated the hell out of me for the past 2 years, so to hear him say "I had such confidence in giving you responsibility for this program because I knew you got it and you were taking the program in the direction it needed to go" was....I don't even know the word for it. I was humbled and grateful.

It puts into perspective for me that I was very capable in this position, and maybe I even excelled at it. Not everything fit my strengths very well, but the areas that I invested it, I invested in passionately. My strengths outweighed my weaknesses.

I am so grateful for the opportunity to grow over the past 2 years. I know so much more about myself, my strengths and weaknesses, and I can say that I have loved working here.