Work & Achievement · A Decembers list
The hours you gave because someone needed them
You signed up to bring casseroles for a week and stayed on the meal rotation for eleven years. Nobody made you. You just kept showing up because the list still had empty Tuesdays.
This is where those roles go. One line each, or a few when a shift you worked still sits with you.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Write down the food bank and you'll remember the woman who came in wearing her work uniform, too proud to look at you, and how you learned to hand over the bag without meeting her eyes.
No one keeps a record of the volunteer hours. There's no pay stub, no title on a business card, no line in any official file that says you spent Saturday mornings for a decade sorting donated coats or sitting with people in a waiting room. The organization may have thanked you at a banquet once. But the actual work "the names, the small failures, the Tuesday you almost didn't go and were glad you did "lives nowhere but in you.
And the reasons are harder to say than the tasks. Why you said yes when they asked, or why you went looking before anyone asked at all. What it did to you the day the work turned out to be heavier than you expected. A book asks for all of that at once, which is why the book never gets written. A list asks for one role at a time "what it was, who it was for "and the reasons come along on their own, line by line, when you're ready for them.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
The roles that end up here
The ones you were asked into
A neighbor caught you in the parking lot. The pastor mentioned they were short a driver. You said yes before you'd thought it through, and then you were in it for years. Write down who asked, and whether you ever figured out why they picked you.
The ones you went looking for
Nobody recruited you. You called the hotline yourself, or walked into the shelter and asked what needed doing. Something had been sitting with you "a loss, a story on the news, a debt you felt you owed "and you decided to do something about it. That reason belongs on the page next to the role.
The ones that changed how you spent your time after
Some roles you did once and set down. Others rearranged your week for the rest of your life, or changed what you thought you were good for. The tutoring that turned into a second career. The hospice sitting that made you gentler. Name what stuck.
By the kind of work
- Meals & food
- Delivering to shut-ins, packing the food pantry, cooking at the soup kitchen "the work where you learned people's kitchens and their pride.
- Kids & schools
- Coaching, tutoring, reading circles, den mother, driving the bus to away games "the roles you took on because a child needed an adult in the room.
- Hospitals & hospice
- Sitting with patients, wheeling the book cart, staffing the front desk, holding a hand through a long night when the family couldn't be there.
- Church & faith
- Ushering, the building committee, the prison ministry, the mission trip "service that came out of what you believed and put you to work with your hands.
- Disaster & crisis
- Sandbagging before the flood, the Red Cross shelter, the overnight hotline "showing up when things had already gone wrong for someone else.
- Boards & committees
- The library board, the PTA, the volunteer fire department "the unglamorous meetings where somebody has to keep a small thing running.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of the hours no one paid you for and no one made you give
These were freely given, and freely they'd be forgotten. Start with the first role you ever said yes to, and put down why you did.