People: Make Choices
I am not a big fan of fatalism. People make choices. All the time. It actually matters what we do.
We all have the power to influence our lives. We choose to stay. We choose to leave. We choose to come back. We choose to reach out. We choose to hope that somebody reaches out.
But as they say, Hope is not a strategy.
What is agonizing is making the choice. How will it affect me? How will it affect others? Should I even care about others? What if I make the wrong choice? Scary.
I’ve been recently feeling like Voldemort. Or like I have committed a genocide. But honestly, I don’t really understand what I’ve done. I just know that people gossip about me and some of them look at me like I am killing puppies with my brain. It’s very difficult. Some of these people I would have dared to call friends a year ago. And I don’t really know what they’ve been told.
I made choices as a manager. Choices I had to make to accommodate some people’s preferences, choices I believed were right for the organization, the projects and in the long run, for all the people involved. I was willing to sacrifice a bit of my mental health for this choice to make other’s people’s lives easier. It was not an easy choice to make and it took me a sleepless week to get comfortable with it.
If I were in the same situation again, I would make the same choice. I believe it was objectively the right choice.
The aftermath, however…. it is very sad. People rejected me. People stopped talking to me. People called me names behind my back. People I trusted told me very hurtful and humiliating things into my face. I actually appreciate that much more than those not talking to me at all. That creates space for imagination.
I felt patronized, condescended, betrayed, stabbed in the back, stumped to the ground. I felt dismissed, demotivated. Hurt. Hurt like hell. I felt thrown out.
A great place to be for somebody with history of depression induced by isolation and loneliness. Fucking A.
So I made another choice.
I could have left. I was considering that a lot. It would be easy. Simple. Clean.
I could have continued in the role I was doing. Without that team. That didn’t make any sense to me. I had a large plan for the whole organization and it wouldn’t work without them.
If I fought a little, I could have continued in the role I was doing. With the team. With different people. Some of them left anyway.
I made a choice to leave management. Because the company is slowly shifting towards prioritizing managers over leaders. Out of those two, I am definitely not a manager.
Now I am making choices about repair.
I don’t believe that people are bad. Or that they mean harm. People hurt each other because of their own hurt, insecurities, anxieties or fears. Some pain is so deeply embedded that it creates subconscious response patterns. I know most of mine very well. I know I make mistakes. I feel bad about them. I own them, I apologize if I understand what I caused.
Sadly, I am not a mind reader, so unless people tell me, I don’t know what I have caused.
It is interesting to discuss with people who should initiate the repair and whether it is even desired. Various opinions.
People who understand the situation from my perspective - because they asked about it - usually say that it’s not on me. Some of the people expect me to start going around and mending things. Most people don’t really give a shit. I wish I would be able to do that.
I do give a shit. The silence is slowly burning me from the inside. Most of my friends are telling me to just cut the people. To choose peace for myself.
Except I can’t. I am fighting myself when I tell myself that that is the right choice.
So I reached out to one person on Friday. I bumped into them in the office and it was very awkward. Then I sent a text in the afternoon. My thumb was levitating over the send button for three hours. I think the conversation went pretty OK.
The next step is actually talking about it. I don’t know when, it’s not important. I am scared. That’s gonna be some next level shit. I need to bring my A-game. Not for them. For myself. And if it goes bad? Well, I will pat myself on the back for at least trying. That counts.