Earlier today I was on a video call with a new colleague. He asked how long I’d been with our employer. I joined in 2010, I said, started in a regional office, moved to HQ in 2013…
At this point another colleague joined and said, yes, new colleague had been remarking how people either seemed to have joined yesterday or have been around for fifteen years.
Yes, I said, and I’m still wondering when I flipped from the one category into the other, apparently overnight.
Inside, though, I was going, Fifteen years? Really? But yes: the arithmetic is simple, it’s the getting my head around it that’s proving challenging. The anniversary slid past without my noticing a couple of months ago. Somewhere between 2013 and here, I became an old-timer.
Compare the starting point with where I am now, and it’s obvious. I live in a different town, county, region. I look very different – my hair’s gone almost completely white. Come to think of it, I started 2010 with barely any eyebrows, having pulled them out in a bad mental health patch.
I started 2010 as a depressed temp, the confidence knocked out of me by failing to get a job I’d been doing for several months, equally scared of giving myself time to breathe and of finishing any piece of work lest there be nothing more for me to do. It took me a long time to find my feet in the union world. In some ways it seemed like the job I’d been born to do, if only I’d known it existed before, working to change the world for the better every day. In others, I felt like a fraud: too shy, too introverted, too posh, too cynical, too everything, or possibly not everything enough. These days I know what I’m good at, I can see how it serves the movement, and I mostly get to do that.
Things change gradually. Even the big changes – office, job title, team, grade – took a while for me to grow into them. There are a few days that stand out in my memory as having moved me forwards significantly, but so much of it was just turning up, and doing the job, and doing the job, and doing the job day after day, and eventually realising that actually I was pretty good at it.
Outside work, too, things changed gradually. Three books, with a couple of pages written per day, and not every day at that; gradually working up the nerve to put them out into the world myself. Getting confident cycling, first on a trike and then on a bike. Buying a house; having a baby; losing both parents: big changes, those, but again, you get used to them gradually, day by day, living in the new world until you’re at home there. Second chances (there were plenty of jobs I didn’t get); another dance with vocation, parting on better terms this time round. It’s quite a lot, really; when I stop and think about it I’m not so surprised that it’s taken fifteen years to get here.
If I could go back to 2010, if I thought 2010-me would believe me, I’d tell her… Hang in there. It works out better than you could possibly imagine.
But I don’t need to. Because she did.
Kathleen Jowitt 