3 for Life - Week 2/3 at Asian Liver Center (ALC)

Wednesday, December 4, 2014

Thanksgiving came and went in a blur of turkey, pumpkin pie and online sales. Meanwhile, I had been taking a break from ALC, which was closed for the thanksgiving weekend. Things had gotten a little quiet at the office in the lead up to thanksgiving. Some of the staff and interns had gone to their respective homes for the week. In those fragmented days, I floated, pottered, was assigned a few tasks, sat in on a meeting or so.

Justin (social media), Angelica (corporate) and I (general/miscellaneous) joined brains and came up with this masterpiece, wishing the invisible social media audience a happy thanksgiving. The expert artwork was the product of peer-teaching, Justin and Angelica evoked a sense of childhood nostalgia in their demonstration of tracing around one’s palm to draw a turkey.

Ie. I drew a turkey by tracing my hand (masterpiece shown below).

Here’s a brief overview of what I’ve been working on lately:

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I’m going to go ahead and be a little bit honest for a moment. It’s challenging sometimes, finding ways to be real and honest whilst realising that an “audience” will be reading these words. (By the way: Hi there, thanks for reading!) But that was the point of this blog; to be honest, or at least to try and be honest.

So, for the past week or so, I’ve had a few ups and downs. There were times where I felt idle and useless, questioned what I was doing here, whether I could have any contribution, or if I was just a random pleb floating around, not really having much input and kind of being in the way. Basically, I was having doubts. For sure, it’s been amazing getting to know the people at ALC, especially the other interns, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity. But I’m not used to the idea of stringent quality control, just pushing through and revising what I think are menial things again and again, sometimes just to be scrapped when they’re sent for approval. At other times I felt like I had nothing to do, and was almost ‘making up’ tasks to do.

Somewhere in that period, I was caught thinking about that idea of expectations vs reality (yup – go re-watch that wrenching scene in 500 Days of Summer, it gets me every time). Things weren’t going how I expected them to. And that meant something: I was actually hanging onto expectations, which contradicted the very task I had given myself in the first place. Wasn’t the point to come in without expectations, be open to learn, and contribute wherever I could?

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I’ll just tie up this post with a little comment about travel. I’ve been finding that travelling abroad makes me feel a stronger sense of connection with Australia. I feel proud to be Australian and embrace a sense of Aussie identity, something I rarely experience at home. Perhaps being surrounded by a foreign environment and being around people of different backgrounds has an alienating effect. Perhaps then, the instinctive response is to cling tighter to what is familiar and feels like home.

Carrie