Hey there,
Thanks in advance to anyone who reads it (I know, it’s long). For a little side-note: I know there are no easy solutions to this and don’t expect an “answer” from anyone. I’m even perfectly fine if this gets no responses – it just helps to put it down somewhere.
Basically, about a month ago, I had a major interpersonal issue with an organization (youth-led, volunteer-run) that I am on the board of (and a major volunteer contributor). To keep things as brief as possible, another board member (our founder and former CEO) was upset about a lot of things in the organization and decided to take out his pain as anger toward me. He sent multiple extremely inappropriate messages to the board attacking me (for truly no reason), made numerous ultimatums (including some threats that involved his own safety, illegal actions, and much more), and basically did everything he could think of to hurt me. And the “kicker” was that I didn’t feel like it was safe to respond to his many defamatory messages and accusations because he implied that he’d consider suicide if I responded. He also had been a friend of mine and role model for well over a year before the incident, so that made this hurt extra bad (he even called me his greatest regret in life – and unfortunately I know that this is true, even if it’s ridiculous).
That situation has been largely resolved. He’s safe and I’m willing to work with him again. However, he doesn’t seem to be willing to work with me unless he’s able to regain my trust and forgiveness first, neither of which are expected anywhere in the near future. However, he’s still part of the organization so I’m stuck dealing with the many issues that he’s causing and he is even making a play for more power now.
I’m doing everything possible to work with him but he just keeps escalating and causing issues for me. He puts half our board meetings on a stand-still because he feels the need to constantly discuss our incident (including multiple variants on proposals to remove me, which have all been voted down by the board). He also has, on multiple occasions, stated that he would commit to a choppy transition if we were to remove him or go against his wishes, which is just ridiculous to me.
That said, he also had been CEO for five years in the past. He’s probably given more than anyone else to this organization. Because of that, it doesn’t seem fair to him to call for his removal either (and I honestly don’t want to deal with the choppy transition – I have way more than enough on my plate without needing to deal with that too). I’m also a strong believer that one incident shouldn’t color a person’s entire history, even if the incident was egregious.
One final side-note: I’ve never even enjoyed my role in the organization. Frankly, I don’t enjoy administrative work and I’ve needed to play way too much office politics in this position. I took the role because I knew that the organization would need to shut down if we couldn’t fill it, and I was one of very few people qualified for the position (and willing to volunteer 10-20hrs/wk). We still don’t have any potential replacements – and it’s honestly almost impossible to find any in the near future – so we would need to shut down if I quit. Our organization serves over a thousand students per year, so I also don’t want to quit because then all those students will lose access to our services – it’s not fair to those students, our volunteers, and our volunteer leadership team if I leave. But it’s also not fair to myself if I stay.
On an unrelated note that’s also been bugging me, there are also three people who I’ve been trying to help out and give support to recently, who I’ve ended up hurting more than I’ve helped (both in and out of the HS community). While my intent was pure, I made the mistake of getting them to expect that I’m able to invest more into a relationship than I’m practically able to. I’m there to chat with people and listen to them, and I love doing it, but I often can’t keep chatting forever and I’ve made the mistake of not being upfront about that with people. Because of that, many of them feel betrayed when they learn that I’m unable to be a long-term friend. I’ve learned my lesson, and can’t do much besides looking forwards and being more careful to be upfront, but I still wish that I hadn’t hurt these people – many were already hurting before they met me and none did anything to deserve more pain.
Anyhow, that’s all from me today. If you somehow got through such a long post, thank you for reading.
-Tuna
