Reflections on 2018/2017 - Essayer

At the end of 2016, I reflected on my year and wrote the following:

So 2017, in line with living life with intention and as I think about the future I want to create, it is my hope that these will be guiding lights in the often unpredictable journey:
1. Figure out if I want to do development as a career
2. Get back into dancing
3. Visit a country that I've never been to before
4. Learn to be less defensive
5. Lose 3 kg by March
6 Commit to spanish class
7. Learn to be more honest and open about my feelings and needs
8. Be brave

In the last 2 years, I am happy that I have achieved some of my goals. I've figured out that I want to continue to do socially impactful work, largely in developing countries. I've visited many countries that I've never been to before, including Portugal and Sri Lanka, and my weight has gone up and down so I guess i've lose weight twice? I also completed my spanish classes, though now all i can really say is hola! como estas?

Learning to be more honest and open about my feelings and needs is an ongoing one, but what I've come to realise is that having someone you love and who you trust to love you through everything makes all the difference.

Lastly, since i last wrote #8, I have come to learn the difference between fearlessness and bravery. People have always told me I was brave but if anything the last two years showed me how much I've been fearless rather than brave. Risks are easy to take when you dont know how hard it will be when you have nothing to lose. But I now know how hard success can be and how failure can be so close, how lucky I've been and how the stars may not always align.

I started 2018, with some optimism and some trepidation, I had left a job I loved, with a team I had built so carefully who have always surprised me with their commitment and their resilience. I wanted to explore a world larger than home and challenge myself to bring my talents, spirit and lessons to the bigger stage. While I truly believed in the deep and lasting impact that my work at Conjunct had, and felt immensely proud of what we had accomplished, there was a nagging feeling at the back of my head. I've always been interested in international development, maybe it was knowing that the life I live had its genesis in a stroke of pure luck I had as an infant, or maybe because I think John Rawls was right - in creating a just society, we must stand behind the veil of ignorance and imagine that we know nothing about the particular talent, abilities, tastes, social class and positions we will have within a social order.

My journey into international development was filled with uncertainty and learning. Everyone doing work on the ground faces an enormous amount of ever-changing factors, from funding to investor dictates, from political climate to business environment. I have to learn to roll with the punches, and tread lightly on over shifting grounds. But I have no regrets. I witnessed the dignity of farmers, I faced the contradictions of being a person from a developed country working in developing countries, question the premise of international development, felt the fear that comes with the responsibility of doing life-changing work and ultimately have grown to have a richer and more real understanding of what the work entails. Perhaps one of the largest learnings was recognising that I am not their to help them of empower them. I am there to work with the people and magnify their strengths so that they get the life that they deserve.

So even though things don't always work out the way I thought they would, I am proud of myself for being brave enough to take the risk, to have the gumption to jump into a new industry (agriculture), and new countries (Myanmar, Vietnam and Cambodia). It wasn't always easy, and it often felt like i was scaling the mt everest of learning curves, but ultimately, when given the option to take the easy way out, the chance to walk the conventional far safer path of working in a large institution with a CBD office and a 9-5, I stayed.

I don't know what the future holds, and sometimes on darker days I'm filled with self-doubt and think to myself that maybe wanting sth too much only sets myself up for failure or heartbreak. I lose confidence and think to myself, "who am I to dream that big?" I hope to hold on to words of wisdom that remind me,

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

 Who am I not to?