The joy of finding the right fit

No, I'm not talking about clothes shopping, although finding clothes that fit is pretty joyful too, especially when you are built like me (short and stout, like the teapot song). I'm talking about finding a job (volunteer in my case) that fits your skill set to the point where you gain quite a bit of enjoyment in doing the job.

For the last 20+ years of my 37-year Federal Government career, I was (in part) a reader and editor of technical material and a writer of technical documentation (not technical as in computers, but as in regulations). Reading and writing have been interests of mine for as long as I can remember; I was writing poems and short stories from at least the age of 12.

I retired from the Government last year (summer of 2008), moved to the beach, and and went in search of meaningful work as a volunteer. I figured that, after giving 37 years of my life to the Government, it was time for me to do something I really LIKED to do. But what? My initial thought was that I wanted to volunteer in the fields of literacy and animal welfare.

I began my search on Volunteer Match (http://www.volunteermatch.org/), a great website where you can plug in your zip code and some parameters about what kind of volunteering you want to do into its search engine, and it will spit out a list of potential volunteer jobs. The problem was that list I was given for my new zip code in Delaware was only a tiny fraction of the list I used to get when I lived in the Washington, D.C. area. However, via that website, I discovered the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP) for the county in which I lived.

I met with one of the RSVP coordinators right after I retired; I wanted to start some kind of volunteer work right away to help me transition from being a full-time worker to a lady of leisure. It just so happened that the State Department of Social Services (DSS) needed help answering phones. It wasn't what I had in mind, but I figured it was something I could get started on right away and would be easy-peasy and not stressful. WRONG!

Despite the fact that working at DSS often made me miserable, I kept doing it for 11 months because I really enjoyed the people I worked with. In the meantime, though, I started some other projects--reading to preschool children at HeadStart through the Read Aloud program, doing occasional fundraising for the county's first no-kill animal sanctuary, and attending board meetings of an animal disaster assistance organization.

Finally, in the spring of 2009, when I was reaching the end of my rope at DSS, RSVP offered me a new gig--a new nonprofit organization was starting up in Delaware and they needed someone from my county to write articles, interview people, take pictures at events, etc. BINGO! Now we were talking!

I've been volunteering for Coming of Age Delaware (CoADE) for a few months now. I quit my DSS job to allow me to devote more time to it (okay, it gave me an excuse to quit). While it may not excite me greatly (CoADE hopes to inspire those over 50 to volunteer and do other community service), it is a good fit for my skill set and I'm really enjoying it. I've written five articles for their newsletter and website (http://www.de.comingofage.org/). Three of them have been published thus far, and the other ones should be published in the coming month.

It gives me a thrill to have finally found a good fit. Maybe not the same kind of thrill as finding a pair of pants that can cope with both my ample posterier and my smaller waist, but a thrill indeed.