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I wanted to write something super honest, humble about our progress, share the process, and beyond—but I keep restarting it, feeling lost for words.
Until I asked myself, “How are you feeling? No really, how are you doing?”
My answer? “We are jumping off the high dive, and when I look down, past my painted toes, to see the distorted swim lanes below, I can’t help but gulp. We’ve come this far, we promise to jump in together, as a team. And then at that leap, instead of falling down, into the water – we fall up.”
That’s the uncertainty of projects like this. You sometimes don’t even experience the givens, and you just. Fall. Up.
And at first, it’s shocking, how fast you can go in unexpected directions, and then it’s terrifying, and eventually the movement becomes a cradle, rocking my what ifs to sleep. Because if there’s anything we’re full of, it’s questions. It’s such a big piece of what we do. Even looking at our team, I think there is this specific bonding that comes from exhaustion. Everything is funnier when you’re tired, just like everything is more meaningful when you work for it. Sometimes I feel like I had never worked for anything before this job. Recently, a friend of mine told me I should take up a Kudoz drinking game. Leave my phone alone for 30 minutes, and the number of WhatsApp notifications and emails within that time is the number of shots I’d have to take. 28. I was almost sad it wasn’t a perfect 30. One per minute.
I’ve never done something like this. I didn’t know that I could.
We‘ve come this far and now, standing on the edge, and this very week: we are in transition. Moving from actively hosting Ku-Doers, and jumping into our business modeling, funding structure, and really cracking just what have we learned during this prototype? We learned everyone else’s gaps: what are ours? And to prove that transition, between Fifth Space and Kudoz, we are hosting five events. I’m personally focusing on the Kudoz badging ceremony.
Things that are considered childish, things like a badging ceremony, can be problematic in the Disability Sector.
When I first started out my work with adults living with cognitive disabilities, I switched into this over-positive monster. I would high five anything that moved. I kid you not, I once slammed my hand in my car door while I was out with one of the people we support, and in my shock said “oh man, this is no worries at all!” It was worries. A lot of worries. A big purple blister of worries. But I didn’t know how to share the most human thing, pain, with someone I supported. Of course they had been hurt before, knew what it felt like, could relate, and I just gutted a smile, and said “awesome, let’s go inside.”
Maybe the worst part is that the person I was with probably could have comforted me. I lost an opportunity to be okay, they lost an opportunity to help, and feel good about helping. We missed a connection with each other.
And we are our missed connections. For everything that could have happened there’s a reason it didn’t. Just like every time I didn’t share what was going on with a person served, they lost an opportunity to learn, and I lost an opportunity to further break down my wall.
So when I ask myself, “How are you feeling? No really, how are you doing?” The answer is “excited, because I’m making a broader offer to the people I support. I’m not dismissing my own emotions, or pain to shelter them, because we are learning together. I’m tired, but it’s only because I get to think all the time. And I’m excited that when this project transitions, even in a sector, that is so often us and them, everyone is included in the jump. Even if we fall up.”