When someone asks me, “Do you think you make a difference?” I feel a little embarrassed.
But depending on how the question is asked, I can also feel hurt.
Sometimes it sounds less like a sincere question and more like a challenge: Do you really believe anything you do matters? In that moment, the question can make you doubt yourself. It can cause you to look back over the years and wonder whether the work, the worry, the advocacy and all the times you showed up for other people meant anything at all.
That hurts because most of what I have done was never about receiving applause. I did it because I cared. I did it because I believed someone needed to speak, someone needed to listen and someone needed to show up.
For years, I have used the radio, my writing and whatever platform I have been given to talk about the issues affecting our communities. I have asked difficult questions, challenged people in positions of authority and spoken up for those who sometimes feel that no one is listening.
Did any of it make a difference?
I hope so.
I hope an interview helped someone understand an issue a little better. I hope something I wrote caused a person to stop, think or see another side. I hope asking an uncomfortable question forced someone in authority to provide an answer. I hope telling someone else’s story helped that person feel seen.
My work with the law has given me other opportunities to make a difference. Sometimes it has meant helping someone find a job. Sometimes it has meant listening to an employee who was struggling, guiding someone through a difficult moment or simply treating people with dignity when a workplace decision affected their life.
But the older I get, the more I realize that the greatest difference we make may have very little to do with our jobs, titles or public accomplishments.
It may be found in answering the telephone when a friend needs to talk. It may be in checking on someone who has been unusually quiet, sitting beside a person who is hurting or reminding someone that they do not have to face a difficult moment alone.
I have tried to do those things for my friends, for the people I love and, most importantly, for my daughter. I have not always gotten everything right. None of us does. But I have tried to show up. I have tried to listen. I have tried to speak when something needed to be said and remain present when there were no words capable of making things better.
Maybe that is why the question can hurt so much. It reduces a lifetime of caring to a moment in which I suddenly feel required to defend it. How do you prove that you made a difference? How do you measure the value of a conversation, a friendship, a word of encouragement or simply being there?
You cannot put those things on a résumé. There is no award for the private moments when you helped someone carry something heavy. Often, the only person who knows what your presence meant is the person who needed you.
The question also embarrasses me because I do not want recognition for caring about people. I do not want kindness to sound like an accomplishment. These are simply the things we should do for one another.
Still, I cannot deny that other people have made an enormous difference in my life. Friends who called at exactly the right moment. People who believed in me. Listeners who encouraged me. Colleagues who trusted me. Those who loved me enough to see beyond the person I showed the rest of the world.
Most of them probably have no idea how much their presence mattered.
That makes me wonder how often the same is true in reverse. Perhaps something I considered small became important to someone else. A conversation I barely remember may have helped another person through a difficult day. Something I said on the radio or wrote in a column may have reached the one person who needed to hear it.
So, do I make a difference?
The question still embarrasses me, and sometimes it hurts more than I would like to admit. But I hope the answer is yes.
Not because I believe I have changed the world, but because I have tried to make my small corner of it a little more honest, a little more compassionate and a little less lonely.
Perhaps that is the real measure of a life—not how many people knew our name, but whether someone’s burden became a little lighter because we were there.
The Valley Viewpoint 