Our good friend Julie left today for Montreal. She is about to spend the next year travelling around the world and somehow, with the slightest of time passing us by, we realize that our world is a little bit lonelier without her.
Julie and I have spent five days a week together for the past year when she came to the Gallery to take over a colleague’s maternity leave. We became fast friends and later that fall, Jamie joined us and the three of us have seldom been apart since.
Watching her drive away with all of her things in the back seat of her car while Jamie and I stood on the curb crying really made me rethink the role that our workplace plays within our lives. Most of my very closest friends are people that I have worked with and in a world of being told to “leave your luggage at home”, I have found an entire family worth of friendships through my work. Some of my nearest and dearest are those that I spend almost every day with. We fight like family, we love like family and in the end, they become very much like family. We’ve endured deaths in the family, new additions to each other’s family, marriage, divorce and everything in between. It makes me recognize just how little salary really matters to me when making my career moves.
There has been more than one opportunity for me to leave this place but I just can’t do it. I simply can’t bear the thought of not seeing some of these faces every day and being a part of each other’s day to day lives. I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t always the case and that there have been many growing pains throughout my career but these challenges have resulted in remarkable friendships that I wouldn’t change for anything. While we are slowing finding ourselves in various places around the world (parting is such sweet sorrow), I now have this collection of incredible people in my life that are above and beyond anything I could have hoped for in colleagues.
We laugh, we cry and damn it all…we can stuff press kits like nobody’s business!
We miss you already Julie!
Julie and I have spent five days a week together for the past year when she came to the Gallery to take over a colleague’s maternity leave. We became fast friends and later that fall, Jamie joined us and the three of us have seldom been apart since.
Watching her drive away with all of her things in the back seat of her car while Jamie and I stood on the curb crying really made me rethink the role that our workplace plays within our lives. Most of my very closest friends are people that I have worked with and in a world of being told to “leave your luggage at home”, I have found an entire family worth of friendships through my work. Some of my nearest and dearest are those that I spend almost every day with. We fight like family, we love like family and in the end, they become very much like family. We’ve endured deaths in the family, new additions to each other’s family, marriage, divorce and everything in between. It makes me recognize just how little salary really matters to me when making my career moves.
There has been more than one opportunity for me to leave this place but I just can’t do it. I simply can’t bear the thought of not seeing some of these faces every day and being a part of each other’s day to day lives. I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t always the case and that there have been many growing pains throughout my career but these challenges have resulted in remarkable friendships that I wouldn’t change for anything. While we are slowing finding ourselves in various places around the world (parting is such sweet sorrow), I now have this collection of incredible people in my life that are above and beyond anything I could have hoped for in colleagues.
We laugh, we cry and damn it all…we can stuff press kits like nobody’s business!
We miss you already Julie!
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