Long Week/Sweet Contentment

It has been a long week. It’s Friday afternoon and I’m feeling totally maxed out and drained and can only think of going home and relaxing in front of the TV with a nice glass of wine. (Yeah right, I have a 2 year old at home, who am I kidding?)

Surprisingly, the other feeling surfacing, other than exhaustion, is contentment. Yes, it’s been insane this week, but in a good way. Circumstances have been such at work that I have been needed to help out in other areas of the company where I normally don’t, and honestly, I’m loving it. One thing that bothered me about my past job with the paper company was that I didn’t get to use my Spanish skills a whole lot. Anyone that knows me well knows that Spanish, (the language, the cultures, the music, the food) is one of my passions. The language fascinates me and I spent years immersing myself in it, and when I was teaching it, I got to use it daily. Then, I took a job in Inside Sales and I didn’t use it nearly as much, and naturally, like any skill you don’t use on a regular basis, my ability to speak Spanish easily was starting to fade. I would jump at any opportunity I had to use my language skills, and those opportunities were few and far between. I often lamented at the fact that I had spent years honing my skills only to have them slip away.

Well, this week our company got slammed with tons of job openings at a company that works with Spanish speakers. As one of the few bilingual coordinators on staff here, I have had the opportunity to be a big participant in making calls to native Spanish-speakers to bring people in to work. At first, I had to think really hard to get through the phone calls I was making. The words were there, but the verb conjugations, the correct word tenses, and the noun/adjective agreement were rusty. My head was throbbing, and I told myself that it shouldn’t be this hard! Come on Sara! You were at the top of your class at language school in Mexico! I powered through it, though, and the calls started to get easier. Slowly, my confidence came back and it made me soooo happy to feel totally comfortable speaking Spanish again. Yeah, it’s probably a little cheesy, but I felt like I was regaining something that I had lost and had been missing. And, the really cool part is that Monday I get to spend the day at this company, so I’m going to get some face-to-face interaction with native Spanish speakers, rather than just communicating over the phone.

I like my job a lot even on the days when I’m not speaking Spanish, but the past few days I have felt that fulfillment career-wise that I have been really searching for and that I didn’t find at my last job. It’s a relief to know in my heart that I made the right decision to leave my former job and try my hand at something new. Ironically, the something new brought me back to something that has been around for quite some time.