My group had a holiday lunch on Friday - a little late for the holidays but it was hard coordinating every ones schedules. I work with an odd group of people. We are varied in terms of our temperaments and our work styles. A few are really laid back and calm, a few are tense and high energy. A few rarely show up. My secretary likes to drop f-bombs left and right. I asked her to do something the other day and she told me I was ruining her whole fucking day because she had to stop working on her crossword puzzle. Anyway, it is an odd group, but it works well for some reason. There is an underlying and unspoken cohesiveness and everyone is extremely understanding when it comes to personal issues/family/health etc. The mentality is different where I work than it seems to be at a lot of large law firms. It has more of a small firm feel even though it is one of the largest firms in the world.
Anyway, I worked there for 3 weeks when I found out I had breast cancer. Imagine the stress of having to tell people you didn't even know what you were about to go through and then to have to go through it basically in front of them. And I work with a lot of men. I spend more time at work than I do at home probably. I spend more time with these people than I do with anyone else. I don't know what I was expecting, but everything that has happened with respect to my job and the people I work with has far exceeded any expectations I might have had. This group of people has continually amazed me. I guess I knew that no one was going to treat me terribly because of this, but I can imagine a place where people would make this difficult, or at the very least, not easy. Not this group. They were incredible. Incredibly understanding, supportive and compassionate. All things I have experienced very little in my life - both growing up and in my more intimate relationships with people. I didn't really understand much about what it meant to be compassionate or supportive. Where I once felt jaded and bitter about the way people act and treat each other - I have renewed hope and I have been touched very deeply by this group of people.
The head of my group can be pretty intimidating. He is pretty hands off when it comes to managing all of us. We just come and go as we please basically, keep our own schedules and get our work done. Sometimes I can go days or even a week without seeing him or saying hello to him. He is extremely intelligent, incredibly sharp and a very good lawyer. I wonder a lot what they think of me there - what the partners say about the associates - what they say about everything I have gone through. Every once in a while he sends out an email to the group, expressing his thanks for all that we do but very seldom, does he tell you himself. My review was good and he wrote a lot of amazing things on it about me and he said in one of his emails that I have repeatedly amazed him and that he didn't know where I got my incredible strength from.
At the group lunch he gave a toast and said a lot of nice things about some of us and the things we went through last year and looking to the future. When he got to me, he could barely get the words out. To my complete surprise, he was completely choked up. It brought him to tears, which brought me to tears and I felt the unspoken but incredible connectedness. I had no idea anyone I worked with was so emotionally affected by anything I went through. I had no idea that these people who knew so little about me could care so much. I assumed they were only observing from a distance and on a lot of days, as I worked no matter what, billed a lot of hours, got everything done on time etc., I thought perhaps they might have forgotten what was constantly and unavoidably on my mind. But that wasn't the case. They were all right there with me the entire time. Some of them prayed for me, they all rooted for me, they all supported me.
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