The title caught up to the work

The email came through on a Tuesday, which feels right somehow. Not a Monday with all that fresh-start energy. Not a Friday with balloons and noise. Just a Tuesday, the way most things that actually matter seem to arrive, quietly, between other things, while you’re doing something else entirely.

The title caught up to the work

Alex came over yesterday afternoon. We’ve had a complicated year professionally, he and I, the kind where you say something hard and then have to keep working next to each other afterward and figure out what you both actually are to each other. We sat at the breakfast bar with iced coffee and talked through what the formal coordinator title actually means in practice. Budget. Calendar. Accountability. And at some point I realized I’d stopped defending the work and started just describing it. That shift was quiet but it wasn’t small. I don’t think I noticed it until I was in the middle of it.

The honest thing is that the credential wasn’t the turning point. The workshops were already happening. The quarterly series was already designed. The hospital was already changing, slowly, the way institutions do, because the work had already been done. What the official title did was confirm that the people around me had caught up to what I knew it was. That’s a different kind of validation than approval. It’s more like correction. Like a clock finally showing the right time.

The quiet after.

I keep thinking about what this means for the heritage work specifically, not just professionally, but in terms of what I’m building with Margaret’s family network and the archive project and all of it. For a long time those two things felt like separate tracks: my job and then this other thing I do on weekends with archival boxes and Abuela Rosa’s recipes. But the more I sit with the coordinator role, the more I think they were always the same track. I was just running them in parallel instead of admitting they were going somewhere together. That’s something worth sitting with for a while.