jeudi, mars 31, 2005

growing up

So here I go, encroaching on my life a year older...
it's interesting to realize that I've learned new things about people. The innate desire in me to just be naively trusting and giving to people has been squashed a lot lately and I'm trying to figure out how to settle into some kind of balance.

As I look at what I've done in my five years here creating and being the executive director of kulaNU I'm astonished actually at how much I accomplished. I don't really think that anyone else can appreciate all I've done here and I know that between me the the Powers That Be, that the honest truth is amazing. For the rest of the world, I rarely tout what I've done or how I've managed it. I prefer instead to let things sit quietly and simply be as they are. So asking me how good I am, is a weird question. I'm by nature inclined to say okay. I know though internally that no average person could have done what I did with this community and with this group. I know that my innate understanding of what it takes to build a community and to do fundraising is special. It's all the stuff I know about people and sensitivities to what people think that makes my efforts work where others were unable to succeed.

Anyway, I spend a lot of time these days wondering just how much of oneself one should share with other people and how one decides what one does and how one does it. I used to have an email list that I wrote to, because I trusted thepeople on the email list to love me and I felt that they could hear what I wrote and do their own thing. It was hard to find that people didn't treat what I wrote with the sort of respect that I'd hoped they would. Of course, one cannot blanket condemn them. Only a handful treated my discourse carelessly. I stopped writing to that list of people, though a part of me wants to very much, because I like people to know how I am and to know that I think of them and want them to stay in touch with me. I just am not exactly sure how to do this though in a way that allows me to feel comfortable and that accounts for various people's personalities...

any thoughts?