The Beginning of August

 I stopped writing in the spring, and not because I had no thoughts...I didn't feel safe expressing myself. Looking back, not a lot has changed, but this week I resigned the position of Secretary of Saturday Market. My reasons were personal...call it burnout. 

I'd been considering it a long time...I remember back in 2017 or so saying I would serve for one more year. I never found a time without a crisis to handle. I felt needed and wanted to get more things in place before I left volunteering...and I go back to about 2009 in this position, before Beth resigned herself.

I wouldn't say this is a time with no crises, but I just find myself unable to pitch in anymore. It is not a particular issue or situation, so don't speculate about it. I have just served long enough. The longer I sat on that decision the more hypocritical I felt, so I just did it with little notice at the Board meeting. 

The relief is amazing. I immediately realized I could write here again, and express my opinions again, without feeling some breach of the duties of loyalty and obedience and care that an officer is bound by. I don't anticipate any rabble-rousing or anything. I deeply need a rest.

The amount of time freed up will be instrumental in meeting my personal goals of this next phase of my life. I am 74. I have limited time left to finish the SM archiving project, deal with my other archives, and get my end-of-life plans in place. There is a lot of property maintenance to do. I have legal things to get into place, medical things, transitions to plan for. 

I have people to treasure before they too transition out of reach. I have books to write, and so many books to read. I have many possessions to shed and projects in progress. If I get extra time, I can learn to relax better. I can simply focus on my own priorities instead of always putting Market first.

It's an immense change and I am experiencing some grief processing as well, of course. I'll just be a member, and of course still plan to support my fellow members in their work. I don't want to undermine anyone else's efforts. I just want to be out of the pivotal position I was in, even though it means not being as "in the know" as I was. I expect I will shed my need to know. 

I've enjoyed not having a vote, trying to stay in a more or less neutral position, but I was beginning to struggle with how to disagree again. I had been there before. I didn't like the dissonance and am glad to be free of it. I have always had honesty as my number one value and I need to feel free to speak honestly without feeling disloyal to anyone. I gave up trying to find someone to take my place and decided that was my own control issue and I could let that pass. People will feel more free to take on the jobs when my oversight and modeling is gone from it...they can do it the way they envision it.

I do wish the other leaders the best. I felt bad that I couldn't let them know more in advance but I don't know how well it would have worked to try to transition out. Seems cleaner and more supportive to just step away and let the important tasks rise to the top and be taken on by the many capable people within the membership. No one has to worry about my scrutiny or my high standards or my historical concepts of how things should work. 

It feels like a bit of an adventure now. Tonight is the Slug Queen Coronation which is just a ridiculous thing to participate in and it may relieve me of my seriousness for a bit. August is the perfect time to have more time to myself...I love summer and plan to enjoy it very much. 

Of course I still plan to sell every week as I still need an income and I'm not planning to retire from working...just from working for free. I may get lazier...we'll find out.

Current thoughts, last May

Wrote this last May, but apparently did not feel okay to publish it. 

 

I'm getting so few readers now that I feel much more free to speak my mind...without feeling like I will get in trouble of get someone else in trouble. Just the concept of getting in trouble shows me my normal world has changed. Normally, I don't feel like there is a higher authority that can cause trouble for me. When I was being actively bullied, they had a certain authority...I had to concern myself with whether or not things would get worse. They did come in here and take sections out to share in the hopes of getting me in trouble...but of course, it's a blog, and I'm free to say whatever I want. So it isn't really governed by any codes of conduct of organizations, or similar, as it's not being done under the auspices of said organizations. But still, that level of scrutiny was daunting and I admit it shut me down more than once. 

 I'm still observing the changes brought by authoritarian attitudes and wondering how to counter them. I did successfully articulate in one situation that the word "consequences" is needlessly parental and has negative connotations that don't promote good dialogue and understanding. I stuck to just a few points in that particular situation to keep a balance and not take the stance of a defender or proponent of any specific solution, trying to hold space for discussion and the exchange of group process. I think it helped craft a little more ease in the way forward, but I am chafing at even being in the situation caused by people's need to control what is not necessarily theirs to control. They want perfect compliance with a somewhat strange set of rules, often ambiguous in wording, but with a lot of underlying assumptions that haven't made it to the status of group agreements...the group agreement stage was skipped.

The whole atmosphere of compliance makes me cringe. I guess that's because of the proximity of the patterns I learned about in my study of codependence and control/compliance relationships. I don't think of myself as controlling, and I don't like how much I am willing to comply, but I strive for neither extreme...I just want to have my time to work and decide for myself how I will spend it. That has meant much less close relationship to others...but I don't miss those interactions that used to confuse and trigger me. When I feel the pressure I retreat to my back deck and my journal and write it all out until I feel grounded again in my own life and my own ways of seeing it in the bigger context of all of the things I do.

I'm often caught unaware by things that have needed to be dealt with that I've overlooked. The chaos of the pandemic period caused a break in the logical sequence of policy-making in response or anticipation of the need for it. Now we seem to go months or years without having the time to revise, tune up or even realize policies are inadequate to the different landscape we are in. Some of the smooth operations of having an experienced team in place have gone by the wayside and although I'm not scrambling as much as I was for the last few years, I don't have the taste for it anymore. I want things to go smoothly with everyone doing their parts, and me not being right in the middle of it.

I want to give gentle lectures about how and why we used to do things, and what the underlying attitudes and assumptions were that led us to be that way. I usually resist, because that was then...perhaps there is a real need for more control now. Orgs are bigger, and the vision has expanded without any discussion of it. I haven't been involved in a discussion of vision or mission or that kind of emotional direction in years. I can't assume everyone's on the same page...we just aren't. It's like our dancing styles...I dance like I did in the 60s and 70s, and most of the people in my world weren't alive then. They dance like the 80s or 90s or whatever people dance like now. It's so different as to be beyond recognition as dancing sometimes. 

So to avoid being sidelined as out of touch, I tend to hold back and see if someone else speaks up first...see what other assumption landscapes emerge before I try to establish mine. Mine seems too trusting, too kind, too gentle for the current atmosphere. I mean, it's desperately emergency-based out there. Everything has the capacity to be extreme, intolerant, dangerous and threatening to the peace. It seems naive to expect to find peace.

Yet I keep trying. I spend time looking for words and phrases to defuse the threats and build trust. I speak up for language and the importance of what words bring with them and how they feel when used to correct, to manipulate, to judge. I spend a lot of time journaling and seldom feel safe to make a spontaneous statement or reaction. I have to carefully consider whether it will help or make things worse. I don't suppose this is anything new...probably people should often be doing that...but I find it taking more time than usual these days.

So I need this space to explore articulation by typing words...it forces me to order my thoughts and find a way out of my dilemmas.