You know that bite-sized story that Margaret Atwood wrote, the one that goes “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.” Well my little tweetworthy TO, that’s how I feel about you. Here’s to a year together TODAY!

May 1, 2011, I got here on the redeye, following a week of insanity trying to wrap up my life out west.

On our very first day together, all I remember is falling asleep on the floor by the fireplace, as I waited for the movers to arrive. The first week was pretty much a blur in my new time zone. Being a night owl out west hurts in the east.

I do remember though that my first day of work was on federal election day. Then we had that amazing honeymoon period, but honeymoons always end too quickly.

It didn’t help that I felt like all I was hearing about from back home was devastation like fires and oil spills.

The sun didn’t seem to shine figuratively and it certainly didn’t shine literally either.

And then there were the jealousies. You’re just going to have to get over that. You know you’re still the one that brings a smile to my face. (Plus people just find it funny when you get jealous because they know I’m so into you.)

As we settled together a little more, you started showing me the diversity that you’re known for. Puis même en français!

You shook my world a little and gave me gifts I’m pretty sure aren’t usually found around these parts.

It took a while but we made it.

And now, when I curl up in front of the fireplace with the lights off, I can *actually* see a few stars through the skylight. It’s a side of you I didn’t think I’d see. (Of course, as I write this it’s completely overcast and pouring – you couldn’t even let me have tonight eh?!)

Still, we’re good. Here’s to many more…

Diane Bégin
Torontonian

The Coach House Institute offered this background on the seminars:

Forty years ago, famous media theorist and professor Marshall McLuhan taught a series of legendary Monday night seminars in the celebrated Coach House located on the physical, intellectual, and organizational boundary of the University of Toronto (UofT). In his honour, the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology in the Coach House Institute of the UofT Faculty of Information is re-launched the Monday night seminar series. The aim of the series is to renew the Coach House’s role as a space to enlist the most searching minds, the most intense visionaries, the fiercest imaginations and give them a still, quiet place to unfetter their imaginations & (re)think the digitally-mediated world.

Because I love books and higher education, the topic Books: The Humanistic Roots of the University? was intriguing. While there are so many things I could talk about related to the discussion as it relates to me as a reader or as a former student, I am going to explore some of the discussion by making parallels to public relations.

The seminar setup

Basically the concept of the seminar (as was briefly described to us) is that a group of speakers are brought together each with a different approach to a topic, then one person acts as a probe to ask questions and ultimately allow participants to leave with 2 to 3 key questions to further ponder from to discussion.

This is what the Coach House looked like back then,  and here’s a 360 degree view from my seat.

While it is pretty underwhelming as a facility, back in the day, the discussion in the Coach House attracted the likes of Woody Allen, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and John Lennon. And I’m a huge fan of inspiration from unexpected places, which is why I quite like it.

The speakers

• Elena Lamberti (Research Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, University of Bologna, Italy);
• Eric McLuhan (Director, Media Studies at The Harris Institute for the Arts in Toronto; and McLuhan Centenary Visiting Fellow 2011-2012, University of Toronto and son of Marshall McLuhan)
• Marc Glassman (Founder of TINARS (This Is Not a Reading Series))

And the prober:

• Nachshon Goltz (Doctoral student, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University)

The discussion probes

While many ideas were thrown around, a few key themes resonated with me as they relate to my work in public relations.

1. What are the humanistic roots for PR?

While this seems like an obvious parallel to make given that communications involves at the very least 2 humans interacting, it may not be so obvious to some. For example in my career (especially early on in social media), some practitioners told me they want to be on a social network for their company but they only want to push out information and not feel like they also have to respond or they wanted to hide behind the company name when responding as opposed to identifying themselves as individuals at the company. Shouldn’t PR always begin with humanistic roots?

2. Is our PR work linear or associative communication?

A few thoughts were tossed around like people do not have linear days unless they are very lucky and imagination is associative – not linear. Someone else said there is no such thing as a linear discourse. So why then does PR maintain a linear form of planning?

3. Is PR better served through empirical thought and learning?

Early on in the discussion it was mentioned that Marshall McLuhan did not consider himself a theorist but rather an empiricist. Empirical thought is open and every step is a novelty, whereas a researcher based in theory would find this chaotic because experience would have to fit a theory. With this connected world where the rules are ever-evolving, does an empirical approach provide better value to PR?

A few probes to ponder…

Then our local paper covered the story by using blog excerpts. Thanks to the Smoky River Express for letting me post the article below. (Girouxville is in the Smoky River municipality.)

My younger brother texted me a picture of the story. The headline made me giggle. He said you know a bunch a people are now wondering who the hell is Diane Begin?

That’s exactly what happened too. I left Girouxville when I was young so I remain the mystery child in my family.

But from those who do know me, the feedback has been awesome.

The story is not about me, but about placing value on things even though some may not place the same value on them. Like when you talk about the “middle of nowhere” as actually being somewhere for you and it doesn’t matter that anyone calls it the middle of nowhere.

Telling that story seemed to resonate with people. Pictures also help to tell a richer story.

A few years ago I was reading a piece in a town history book about one Sunday afternoon in 1949 when the church crowd gathered on our home quarter. The big event was the first oilrig north of Leduc No. 1 that had hit oil.

The discovery became the largest operation in North America at the time. It must have been big because there’s still a pump jack there today – pumping 63 years later. And a picture makes it more real than having me tell the story alone.

This summer, the Smoky River area will be celebrating its 100th birthday. It would be amazing to see 100 location-based pictures pop up online to help document the area’s history through a digital footprint.

The pride for the area is definitely there. We saw it on a national scale back in 2006 when Falher (in the Smoky River area) almost became Hockeyville.

Pretty pictures and not so pretty pictures have an amazing story to tell.

When I was digging around on Google Earth, I found this picture of Lake Kimiwan (also in Smoky River, near McLennan, AB).

When you look at the satellite view, it looks like a picture taken on a lake but when R, Jones took a picture in 2010 all you see is dry cracked earth.

Location based technology didn’t exist back in 1949, but 100 years from now people could actually get a sense of what it was like for us if people continue to document our world through the web as a sort of digital time capsule.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

The web has made me lazy but also in a strange way more curious – especially recently.

So my mom gave the four kids in our family middle names that for various reasons came from specific family members. My siblings have a parent, grandparent and great grandparent’s names respectively.

My name came from a great-aunt who served as a nun for 48 years.

Because of a series of events over the past few years, I’ve grown more curious about her. Her name is Soeur Angéline Bégin.

While it’s brutally obvious when I say my life has been far from nun-like, there’s one thing that helps me imagine more what her life must have been like.

I have lived my whole life as an experience seeker.

Soeur Angéline however lived in convents that she rarely left. Her life was sheltered, yet through everything I have ever read or heard about her, she was most pleasant, grateful and happy. She lived in Québec and visited Alberta once. Her life consisted of daily prayer including getting up twice a night to pray. She prayed for everyone in our family.

In fact it was on a March 23, when my mom was just pregnant for me that my parents went to visit her in Sherbrooke, QC. That day was my dad’s birthday. My dad was beside himself when she wished him a happy birthday. She knew every family member’s birthday and would say a special prayer for him or her on that day on top of all her other prayers.

That was the only day I was ever in her physical proximity – and given my state, that was just barely. She obviously never had children of her own and as far as we know, I’m the only person that’s ever taken on her name.

She was pleased to hear that I was named after her shortly after I was born, which was about the same time she was hospitalized. She died the following April on Palm Sunday – about five months after I came into the world.

The search

So I started asking more questions recently because I wanted to know where she was buried. Nothing in all the family records I had told me that. I turned to Google. Of course it was not as easy as typing her name to find out, which is where my frustration started.

If you think about it, cumulatively our earth is supposed to have had 108 billion people.  How many do you actually think have some sort of digital footprint?

Considering I have friends today who avoid having any sort of record online, what are the chances of finding something out about a woman who led a very quiet life and died decades before the internet even existed?

I probed one of my friend’s who writes about genealogy academically and got some good advice about city and provincial archives, ancestry websites and graveyard searches (yes there are sites for that too). But I got nothing.

I did find a census record from 1911 when she was nine. (My pépère is Arthur on the record.)

My mom eventually dug up a booklet that was created about her life when she died.

When I was reading it a number of things caught my attention about her but one thing put into perspective how the web has changed me.

Soeur Angéline spent the first part of her years of service at a convent in Chicoutimi. When I was a teenager I spent the summer at the CÉGEP de Jonquière, which is next door to Chicoutimi.

Had I known this bit of information when I was 16 I probably would have wanted to visit the convent or at least its past site. The thing is, we weren’t on the internet back then. As ridiculous as it sounds, even as curious as I was, I don’t know if I would have known how to find it.

My first instinct today is to start with Google, but I can’t even remember a time when I couldn’t turn to Google. And now that Google exists, I’m even more curious when things don’t come up.

To find Soeur Angéline’s final resting place through the web wasn’t specifically through records about her though but rather through a trail of real-live people.

I ended up chatting over email with a lovely woman named Huguette at the Regroupement des Archives du Séminaire de Sherbrooke et de l’Archidiocèse de Sherbrooke.

While I had a booklet about Soeur Angéline’s life, the only reference to her convent was an index card that said “Les Servantes du T.S. Sacrement.” I had no idea what T.S. stood for, but Huguette of course knew.

She put me in touch with the convent of Les Servantes du Très-Saint-Sacrement of Sherbrooke, where I corresponded over email with a Soeur Maria.

Just like that, I found out Soeur Angéline Bégin was buried at 580 Dufferin Street, Sherbrooke, Québec.

Through this post I’m putting Soeur Angéline Bégin’s life online, which eventually will mean information on her will be searchable because she’ll now have a digital footprint.

So why even bother putting it online?

One of my favourite things to read when I get my Maclean’s magazine is the back page called “The end.” It’s always a story of an ordinary person and the life they lived, what their dreams were and the people they affected.

While she led a very quiet life, Soeur Angéline cared and focused pretty much her whole life on others. My gesture is small in comparison but putting her story online is at least something. Try Googling her now.

Next month, I’m heading to Montréal with a girlfriend and we’ll be driving out to Sherbrooke so that I can finally – after all these years – visit Soeur Angéline’s home and final resting place.

I can’t even tell you how excited I am.

The booklet was scanned on my phone using an app called JotNot (Pro version) that let me PDF the document and upload it to Dropbox.

There’s nothing like intelligent debate, especially with someone who happens to be as geeky as you about communications theorists.

Because my background involves the evolution of my career as a PR practitioner I started my literature review with a book that is the foundation for PR, the book that established the RACE formula (research, action, communication, evaluation, although now the “a” has been changed to analysis).

Basically RACE is how PR practitioners plan and the formula came from a 1963 book by John Marston called The Nature of Public Relations.

I’ve written before about how I think the RACE formula is outdated, because two-way communication is not a linear process. I still think all those elements are present (RAC&E) but not as a sequence because sometimes you’re doing all of them at once.

This blog post is essentially part of the outtakes from our paper, since it won’t be included but I thought it was still worth writing about.

I’m still reading the book but some bits kind of surprised me recently because I was expecting it to be a manual about “how to be a slick PR man.” (Marston refers to the PR man throughout the book – I didn’t add that for effect.)

He also holds some simplistic views about different types of people in the book like blue-collar workers and farmers.

Still, his idea about what PR should aspire to be really resonated with me, with clearly no slickness involved. The irony is that back then PR also had a PR problem.

He talks about how the ideal PR model includes two-way communication while recognizing they did not have the ideal PR model given that the modes of communication were mass media.

He writes, “Public relations practitioners, politicians, educators, advertisers, clergymen, and others should realize that although the flow of communication today is mighty, most of it is one-way!”

But what surprised me most is how he talks about communication and how important it is to instill trust.

Marston goes into great detail describing why most forms of communication are persuasion.

I was having some difficulty with that but he talked about how even in the simplest conversion between two people there’s persuasion, whether it’s that you want to find out how someone’s day is going, provoking a debate or just trying to get him or her like you.

He goes further to say, “Religion, education, patriotism, and all altruistic enthusiasms are “persuasions” which can generally be realized only by persuading others in turn. The man who says that he has received nothing from persuasion is either densely ignorant, a recluse or self-deluded. Despite its abuses, persuasion is a gentle art in which wisdom, patience, love, and friendly enthusiasm are by far the greatest elements and it is much to be preferred to the more brutal, crass forms of forcing or buying human cooperation.”

Yup, no matter how things change, some still remain pretty much the same.

I’m struggling as I write this because attacks like this are often rooted in ignorance and ignorance can lead to hate, but hate is difficult to simplify when you can’t even understand how people can be brought to do such things.

So instead, I’ll focus on something (or someone) that I do understand – me. (most days)

I had the opportunity to interview Dan Tisch, APR, FCPRS recently about his appointment as Global Alliance chair (an international umbrella organization for PR organizations including CPRS). He also attended the first-ever Global Congress for Muslim PR Practitioners held in Malaysia in December. Read his blog post here.

What struck me is when Dan was telling me about the sessions and how it resonated with why I became a PR practitioner – to face real challenges and to help tell real stories. Real PR is not about the ridiculously outdated notion of spin.

The congress was an inclusive event as the organizers invited non-Muslims “who are interested in gaining truthful knowledge of the Public Relations developments affecting the spheres of economics, social and politics of the Muslim World.”

Truth makes your choices about what to communicate obvious. Either it is truth or it isn’t.

There’s no such thing as shades of the truth, which is why “truthiness” is not a real thing.

Actually, years ago I was surprised by something I read about Stephen Colbert – not the character living in truthiness, but the real person who plays the character. He is a real-life devout Catholic.

In interviews he’s given, he talks about how he had two intellectual parents who encouraged their kids to question authority, even when it came to their church. So while, he lives as a real-life Catholic, it doesn’t stop him from challenging the religion on his show.

So here’s my truth.

I think I started questioning authority within religion when I heard a story told in private as a kid by a priest saying basically said it doesn’t matter what religion anyone belongs to. He said when you get to heaven you’ll be surrounded by Muslims, Jews, Sikhs…basically saying we’re all the same.

Of course I was young and wasn’t paying a lot of attention to things.

In fact, it wasn’t until recently that I found out there is a mosque in a community close to where I grew up. I heard about it through a friend who used to go to it with his family.

It was part of my own ignorance, not realizing that there was much more diversity surrounding me than I realized.

Or maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t know enough to think it was different.

Regardless I wasn’t looking for it, so it’s no surprise that I never knew it was there. Had I known though, maybe I would have wanted to go inside. And I would not even have known how to make that happen.

Sometimes what we consider the most challenging has the simplest answer.

To go inside, just like any other building, the door was a pretty good bet.

So last summer I participated in Doors Open Toronto where a bunch of places around the city literally open their doors to the public.

There were a few other religious buildings that I wanted to go in, but only managed to go to a mosque. It was the closest to my neighbourhood in a time when I was still having to give myself a lot of “getting lost in Toronto until I find the place” time.

The mosque had opened their doors and they were surprised by how much traffic went through the place. Many people said the same thing as me, “I didn’t think I could come in before today.”

Some time after (during Ramadan) all of the attendees received an email inviting them back to share a feast. I jumped at the opportunity to secretly observe amongst the crowd.

I was told that there were four of us who sent an RSVP but as it turned out that day one person from the threesome fell ill and had to cancel. So it ended up being just me.

They gave instructions on dressing modestly and a hijab was given as a gift to wear.

I was so excited to go back, the absolutely last thing I wanted to do was be disrespectful in any way. I actually forgot that I should have had my arms covered but no one said anything and when I brought it up, they said it was OK because I was a guest.

During the breaking of the fast, I sat at a table with three families, sitting to the direct left of the imam. The imam spoke better English than he get himself credit for and the questions just kept coming from me.

It was a beautiful evening where I had a chance to ask some questions about things I always wondered about and got very honest answers.

I was even invited back to the final picnic of Ramadan but because it was at a park not easily accessible on transit and because of other commitments, sadly I wasn’t able to go.

How about exploring those things that pique your curiosity in 2012?

I am infinitely curious and while I still have many questions, I can tell you that the best part of all this was that something unknown (because of my own ignorance) became known. And that’s the best feeling of all.

The second that I moved out, my brother moved into my room and my stuff was out. And my mom laughed when I said I hoped it would stay exactly the same as when I left.

You can romanticize your life all you want but if others don’t play along, I guess you’re just left with reality.

So since 2006, I’ve been checking Google Earth to see what our family farm looks like when photographed from space. The farm and a large area around it, including our home town has been pretty much fuzzy since then. Basically you can’t zoom in like you can on other parts of Google Earth.

Back in 2006 Michael Jones of Google Earth did say at NAIT GIS Day that he hoped they would have higher resolution imagery of the entire earth within a couple years.

While it’s still not the case, I was happy to see a limited version of Google Streetview came to our mainstreet probably sometime in 2010.

Surely very few people ever have a need to look up my town of Girouxville (pop. 282) because it is so small and easy to get around if you do find yourself there.

The thing is, no matter how insignificant that tiny little town is to some, it is a big part of me.

Girouxville became my home because all four of my grandparents settled there. All four are also buried there, along with many other people I’ve loved.

My mom grew up in town in a house that’s still standing today and my dad still lives on a farm settled  by my pépère Bégin seven and a half miles outside of town back in 1927.

Uploading pictures to Google Earth

So, to help preserve the town for me now that I live so far way, I decided to figure out how I could get a few pictures up on Google Earth. I tested it out in Toronto before I went home for the holidays and it basically takes two programs.

1. Google Latitude – Google Earth will only accept images that have location tracked on them. They do it through Google Latitude so I downloaded the app to my iPhone. Just a caution to remember to turn it off when you’re done or else people will keep knowing your exact location.

2. Panoramio – Google Earth uses location enabled Panoramio images, so I also downloaded this app to take pictures from directly once I linked it with Latitude.

Once you’ve uploaded images, it takes some time for the images to be reviewed by Google before they are posted.

Mine were approved within 24 hours. I took 33 pictures, but 31 were approved. The two that weren’t were a street sign and a monument near where the old wading pool.

The wading pool is now gone, as are the grain elevators and the school where I spent ten years of my life.

Next year, I’m told the curling rink will also be torn down.

The Edmonton Journal had done a piece on the town in 2009 when CN closed its rail line. The coffee shop owner that feared she’d have to closed shop since has.

Of the bits that remain, my favourite parts are the forest behind the grotto and the museum because they always seemed so mysterious. I spent lots of time as a little girl exploring both.

The good news is that there’s a recent addition breathing some new life into town – a four-lane bowling alley that opened in November 2011. (We went bowling after taking these pics.)

The busy bowling alley, like the full church on Christmas Eve, reminds you that no matter what the world outside thinks, there’s still life there.

The new year will mark the point in my life where I’ll have lived in cities longer than I lived in my little town. Even though I left home the moment that I had the means to go, I’ve always been proud of where I came from.

My story began in middle of nowhere and now, at least, nowhere is sort of on the map.

Some words from the guy from Facebook stuck with me, probably because I have been thinking a lot about the ridiculous quest for perfection lately.

He said that at Facebook, they live by “done is better than perfect” – obviously stemming from maintaining innovation in a competitive market.

Of course there’s professionally but it got me thinking about it personally.

A few years ago I worked at a college and for some reason – that I can’t remember – it was a really busy time. Long story short, I ended up getting a parking ticket because I hadn’t realized I put my parking receipt face down on my dashboard.

It was my mistake, but still I contacted the head of security and parking to see if he could help. He responded and very quickly my ticket was reversed, which I was really grateful for because I didn’t think I had a chance.

Then I got caught up in my busyness again to the point that I almost forgot to say thanks. He wasn’t around work, so I couldn’t thank him in person. Instead I sent him an email. It was the best I could do. Plus I could thank him in person next time I saw him.

What I didn’t know was that my fellow coworker was actually on a leave from work and the emails he had been responding to were from his hospital bed.

A few days went by and Monday morning a coworker came by to tell us that the head of security and parking had died of a heart attack over the weekend.

You know when people in the workplace say in passing “so if I get hit by a bus tomorrow…” Well it was like that except he had a heart attack and I felt like I had been hit by a bus.

Fast forward to tonight… I went up to a friend to wish him a happy birthday. With new friends, there are many surprises like not realizing our birthdays were two days apart. Friendship is that imperfect thing where you feel like you randomly meet a person and for whatever reason you hit it off.

This friend is in his 50s and we became acquainted a short time back when he came up and introduced himself to me. He has a face that you like instantly. The fact he always seems to be smiling doesn’t hurt either.

We hit it off in our very first conversation because he has a place out in the country with horses where he goes every weekend to go fox hunting (thankfully they don’t actually kill foxes though, I asked).

After I told him I was from a farm his response was “but you don’t look like a farm girl.” I don’t really know what he meant because I’ve only ever looked like me. Farm people have as consistent a look as city people, which is to say there’s no consistency.

So I laughed and we’ve been friendly since. Whenever we spot one another we say hi and I often get a hug. (Good news: Toronto folk are just as huggy as westerners).

So tonight I was greeted and hugged by the same friendly smiling face who was pleased to hear our birthdays were two days apart. I can’t even express how sweet this man is, when he asks how things are, you really feel like he cares to know.

So I asked him if he had a good year, to which he said no, especially not the last couple weeks.

His partner of 20 years died this week after a struggle with cancer. I had no idea. Again, hit by a bus.

What do you say to someone who lost the love of his or her life, like literally this week?

There are no perfect words for a moment like that. Just friendship. Fortunately we’d been there and done that.

Done is in fact far better than perfect.

I’m not knowledgeable enough on what the company did to know whether it was genuine or not, but what bothers me is when people generalize PR as being something superficial with the end goal of just making people believe something at any cost. That’s not what ethical PR practitioners do.

If I could simplify my job to one statement, it is to make sure the communication is flowing both in and out with the people affected. That’s the whole “relations” part of public relations.

There seems to be a belief that PR is just traditional media relations – which happens to be one of the most visible parts of what some of us do.

But the thing is some of us don’t even work with traditional media at all. In fact, some of the best PR ever done is not visible to the masses and doesn’t get any media coverage because the goal is making sure the communication is flowing both in and out with the people affected – regardless of if the information is considered good, bad or neutral.

Back in 2002 or 2003 I woke up one morning to news that chambers of commerce across Alberta and BC were receiving mysterious packages in the mail. I worked for the Alberta umbrella organization representing over 100 of community chambers that were getting these packages that supposedly had cryptic messages and mysterious objects in them.

Turns out it was a religious organization that was trying to get a message out. Fortunately, they didn’t pose any kind of threat to anyone’s health or safety.

The story completely died but it took all day to get to that point and of course people were panicking in the meantime.

Because technology wasn’t what it’s like today, we simply sent update emails throughout the day as things progressed. When everything was done, I remember getting notes of thanks about how scared chamber managers were about their own safety and they were just so grateful (especially the very isolated ones) that we made sure they were informed.

That made my day, to know we actually made a difference and that we did our job.

In that position I also first experienced social media. Because of the isolation felt by our chamber managers, we experienced great success through launching online discussion forums to give them a platform.

While I value what traditional media brings to PR, the immediacy of social media in getting in touch with the people who want to get in touch with you and vice versa is invaluable for a PR practitioner.

Fast forward to a few years later… I was part of a crisis communications team at a post-secondary institution.

A colleague informed us that campus security told her that a gunman had just run onto campus. It was the result of a police chase that happened to end on campus.

Fortunately again it was no longer a threat, but quite literally just as she finished telling us, there were two posts on Twitter with people asking what was going on because they saw it happen.

Fortunately we were able to respond quickly, with accurate information and to alleviate any fear of further threat.

Again, fulfilling our role as people making sure the communication was flowing both in and out with the people affected made my day.

Crisis communications is but one area of PR where we use those darn “PR strategies” or “PR tactics.”

PR is continually evolving and social media has already made PR more visible and transparent by outing some unethical practices.

Hopefully one day it will also mean that PR is also viewed as something less superficial and much more genuine too.

When I was a kid, I felt ripped off because the red maple leaf on Canada’s flag was nowhere to be found where I lived. I’d try to find any leaf that looked remotely the same – in rural northern Alberta.

One time my mom was talking about some maple trees in our yard and I questioned her because clearly they weren’t maples because the leaf shape was totally different. Turns out it was a maple, just a different kind. I felt even more ripped off.

The maple leaf shape from our flag is as a symbol after all supposed to be part of our Canadian identity, but for me it pretty much didn’t exist.

This fall – in my new eastern home city – maple leaves are found everywhere. I smile now at my ridiculousness, but then it continues…

So, now with abundance I’m trying to find the “perfect” red maple leaf to send my niece in Alberta. (You know to save her from my ridiculous constant search as a kid.)

Of course I can’t find that “perfect” leaf. They often get spots, are asymmetrical or are crumbling.

Apparently a ridiculously stubborn child makes for a ridiculously stubborn adult.

I kind of like the idea though as a metaphor representing a symbol for identity.

This week I participated in the national conference call to prep this year’s Accreditation in Public Relations candidates for exams coming up later this month. Later on the same day, our local CPRS chapter hosted an open house to introduce our roles as the new board – an event that had a huge student turnout.

In one day, I spoke with I don’t even know how many people about my path including my work and both my education and accreditation. It’s been far from easy and certainly far from perfect.

My experience, as part of my identity would be just as imperfect as those leaves.

My education leaf probably would be six times bigger than the accreditation leaf, just because it had all those extra growing seasons, but the growing seasons for both didn’t have much sun or rain since I was dealing with some other challenges at the same time.

They’d both be ugly, spotted, asymmetrical and crumbling because there were times when I was going through both of those processes that I doubted myself and I’m sure others doubted me. (There’s a prodigal child comment that a friend made that comes to mind.)

Those leaves may have already fallen but I still like looking at them, no matter how ugly. To me they still look good and I am proud of them.

It’s almost as though, that the feeling of being ripped off as a kid grew into a healthy longing feeling. One that made me start feeling no matter what the experience it is my own.

There’s nothing more perfect than that, especially since there are way more leaves up in that tree to look forward to. Plus then, there’s also next year’s growing season.