Finding Silent Moments

As crazy as it is to witness the swift passage of time, attending a 14-year-old’s birthday really hammers home how fast days become years. It was great to be able to celebrate with our nephew yesterday, but also reinforced our new edict about having a day at home with no intrusions or excursions today. Hubs has been overloading on CEU classes to reinstate his standing with the NCCAOM as the final step in the process of attaining Virginia licensure, and he’s about as burned out as I’ve become at the mention of further studying. We’re both introverts and need those silent moments to find peace with the next steps on our paths.

Not to say I haven’t started making baby steps of progress on studying for my certification. But here, again, I’m nibbling around the edges, not yet entirely ready to dive in to the memorization necessary to think like a successful PMP test-taker.

It’s been a week since my writing workshop ended, and I kept thinking I’d have the focus to start tackling revisions and reformatting for Red Slaves 1 for the new distributor. Instead, I enjoyed a string of nights at home with hubs, catching up first on Agent Carter and then an episode of Agents of SHIELD. Peggy Carter is my new high-water mark for a character with personal agency–and my personal hero. One of her final lines is: “I know my value. Anyone else’s opinion doesn’t really matter.” It hit me where I live. It’s a message I’ve struggled to articulate over the course of my career, and it’s helped me live the classic statistic of 78% of a man’s income for similar experience and education. Not just once, but at every job I’ve ever had. I’ve tolerated it because I’ve felt lucky to have A job in the variously bad economic situations I’ve lived. I’m starting to think I may be the problem. I don’t know my own value, despite almost three decades of evidence that I’m a worthwhile hire. Finding out sometime down the road with a company that I was brought on at the minimum level possible for my position classification has always been sold as “but you have up-side if you stay.” The problem is, it hasn’t actually materialized. I need to find Agent Carter’s strength, my own inner strength, to articulate my value. I’ll be working on that.

I’ve been working on getting back on the walking track, too. I walked every night this week, for at least a mile; last Sunday for 2.2 miles, and yesterday for 1.5 miles. So my total for the week was 7.3 miles. A lot closer to my goal. Unfortunately, I had an invisible spider encounter on Wednesday night’s dog walk that had my jaw swell to chipmunk-impressive proportions. It actually started constricting my throat enough that I decided staying close to home was not only important for finding peace and inner strength (per this week’s quote) but also for my good health. I’m a lucky gal that hubs has the skillz to fix these issues, so I was back to 90% of normal by Friday already.

So I have things to work on, but with the good break of today to refresh myself, maybe I can take bigger steps. I’ll report back next week with my progress again, but in the meantime suggest you check in with the other ROW80ers on theirs.