random act of bravery

I am trying to get better about speaking up at work. I've passed the six-month mark at my current job, and as I move into 2012, it's time to start figuring out how/if to get a visa. Because I'm bound by my (totally-amazing, in-no-way-regrettable) Canadian citizenship, I have to put a lot of stock in my current job. Once I commit to a visa, I won't be able to easily leave my position or move to another organization for quite some time. Having never had a job for longer than a few months, it's incredibly daunting to think that I could be locking myself to this particular, not-totally-satisfying one for any real length of time. That being said, it is what I need to do if I want to stay in New York - and for the moment, I absolutely do. (And yay for that realization, by the way.) So I want to focus on making my job the best it can be - the most interesting, the most fulfilling, the most engaging, the most challenging. I want to amass as much knowledge and experience as possible. There is room for me to do that: I simply need to DO it. DOING it is going to be a theme this year. 

So I kicked it off today by chiming in on a strategic planning discussion, something about which I feel quite passionately. It felt good, and also totally bad, in that I was running on two hours of jet-lagged sleep and couldn't feel my limbs, and therefore can no longer actually remember what it was I said that, at the time, seemed very RELEVANT and also very IMPORTANT and probably very SMART, and could have just as easily been me blowing raspberries at my boss for seven minutes.