I was panicking. I needed to quiet my mind and open my heart.
Some mornings I have to take a deep breath and just be. It’s hard to do that when I’m thinking of a million things at once. Often my mind is running through topics like what makes me fulfilled, where do I want to work, and am I making a genuine difference? I realized one day that I was looking at my work all wrong. No wonder I was having daily freak outs.
It can be easy to lose sight of why you started to do something in the first place. You become overwhelmed with daily tasks or the mundane in an activity that it doesn’t seem to hold much value to you anymore. I quickly realized in my stay here that I do not think I want to do this type of work anymore. Though very noble and much needed, I’m not cut out to raise teenagers for a living and to make minute and significant decisions about their lives which can affect them forever. It’s simply not where my strengths and talents lie. Of course I also panicked about that but I’ve come to peace with it.
I’m going to be very honest with you right now. When I realized this isn’t the work I wanted to do, I immediately wanted to go back home. I missed my friends, my family, my boyfriend, and my comfortable surroundings that I had been away from since January 13. I seriously considered booking a flight back to South Carolina. Then one day one of the girls grabbed my hand and walked me into the office. She said something to me in Spanish and asked me to tell everyone else. “Alexis is my best friend,” she said. I felt awful.
I had been selfish. I thought this work was about me. I thought I’d find fulfillment in doing only what I was suppose to do for my life. I forgot that this work had about 10% to do with me and 90% to do with loving these girls who haven’t seen true and genuine love in quite some time. These girls have no idea what it’s like to have a normal childhood or be a normal teenager in a loving and caring family. They have relatively nothing and are told by many that they are in fact nothing. I’ve realized now I simply care about making sure the girls know how much of a lie that is and that they are very special and valuable.
I’ve been panicking less lately. I’ve learned to take a moment and quiet my mind and open my heart. But fulfillment is tricky. We’re told that you need to be in love with everything that’s going on with you in order to be fulfilled or you need tons of stuff around you for happiness. That simply isn’t the case. Finding fulfillment doesn’t mean I have to love what I’m doing. It doesn’t even mean I have to think this is the right work for me. It means that I put everything possible into what I’m doing because I know this isn’t about me. It’s about them. It’s about serving them, every single day I am here.
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