Meghan, You Are Mega

#AllTheThings

It's a bit of a bittersweet day for me. Today is the last day at OpenMedia for Communications Manager Meghan Sali. I've worked with Meghan (or "Mega", as her name is often delightfully truncated) for the majority of my limited time volunteering at OpenMedia. I know I speak for everyone at that organization when I say she'll be sorely missed. 

I got involved with OpenMedia in spring of 2016. Shortly after, Meghan was looped-in on the editorial process of one of my first articles. The OM team is big, diverse, and oft-changing, so I'm not too embarrassed to say that, at the time, I was having a lot of trouble keeping everyone straight in my mind (sorry folks!). Wanting to make certain I attached a face to the name, I did my usual and headed over to the OM website, where conveniently, there was an article about her heading up a recent TPP protest. 

Standing in front of a crowd of activists, holding a megaphone, smartly dressed, and looking large and in charge – this is the first impression I formed of Meghan Sali. In my experience, she has never failed to live up to that heroic, larger-than-life, archetypical image.

For over a year, Meghan has acted as one of my primary editors and someone I could brainstorm ideas with in a pinch. That's just one tiny sliver of her duties at OM. While I am by no means the best person to enumerate her many accomplishments, Meghan is the brainchild behind tons of OM campaign rhetoric – particularly regarding opposition to intellectual property maximalism and criticisms of trade deals like the TPP and NAFTA. She is what I like to call an "All The Things" kind of person.

But Meghan is more than just a co-worker, she has become a valued friend.

In this life, you'll meet a tiny handful of people with whom you feel you "get" eachother within moments of meeting. It is a feeling akin to the instant gratification of snapping two Lego bricks together, except that the bricks are your BRAINS. Click.

From that moment forward, every conversation will seem like a race against time – a synchronous upload/download where both parties try to express all the meaningful ideas that need to be relayed between brains before the tête-à-tête comes to a close and any further thoughts or debates or epiphanies must be tragically tabled until your next meeting.

While it pains me to know that Meghan's next moves mean our in-person conversations will likely be much farther and fewer between, I nonetheless take a great deal of solace in the knowledge that she's destined to achieve (even more) great things. She is brilliant, driven, courageous, and a source of seemingly infinite energy (which may need to be harvested by the electric grid for the betterment of humankind). 

I'd wish you good luck, Meghan, but you don't even need it. :-)

See you 'round the internet.

P.S. – Thanks for rescuing me from the hedonism of semicolons and showing me the true way of the em-dash. 

Photo Credit: OpenMedia