why hurt?
After years of service my volunteerwork has ended this summer. Not in a pleasant way. Which is supposed to be entirely my fault.
According to one of the boardmembers I had difficulty in finding my place right from the start. It did feel like that in the beginning and the end, but not so much in the years in between. This last year I found the chair person was actively seeking to deminish my role and extend hers. This led to so much confusion with me, that I started a discussion about what my role should be. The board answered with a list of tasks comprising of everything I was doing at the time, minus what the chairperson wanted to do herself. I did not agree with this. The board, with some hesitation, agreed to extend my participation and told all concerned in an official board communication. I advised the board to talk about this with the entire group of people concerned, in order to get everybody on board. They didn't heed this advise, and their short email stating my extended tasks led to friction. This was cause for the board to deminish my role considerably, with my consent. The communication between the chair person and me went sour quickly, which for me was reason to ask the board not to have her communicate directly to me, but have some other board member do this; someone who could take the sting out and relay the true meaning of the message. This they agreed to, and we got out of the woods again.
So far I could live with the situation.
After a few months of trying to work in my new role, it became abundantly clear to me that this deminished role was a very bad idea, even though it had been mine to begin with. I had made the mistake of thinking that I would be fine as long as my responsabilities reflected my decisiveness. Later I found the situation to reflect the one I encountered when I had a burn out. Reducing the tasks in case of burn out more often than not excellerates the down fall and aggravates the problem. I hadn't thought of that, but this is exactly what happened.
I requested an evaluation with the board, who had not seen fit to ask for one themselves. On a very personal level I explained that I couldn't possibly go on this way. The previous weekend I had come to terms with the idea that this would mean the ending of our working relationship. I said that I did not see a way to go forward, but that if they did, I was certainly willing to try that. They decided to extend my tasks. I immediately went to work.
The chairperson however once again developed insurmountable objections to my approach, and once again asked the board to approve her idea's. They did. This time they agreed to have only her communicate with me, and that no one should even try to moderate in any way. Again the communication went sour quickly. They rejected any responsability for my having to leave. Instead they insisted to portray it as a choice I had made freely. They asked me to stay on in the way I had explained was impossible for me. To me this meant they had given me a choice of one. Which to my mind is no choice at all. For there to be a real choice, at least two real possibilities must exist.
Over this a correspondence developed, in which they quickly saw themselves as the offended party. When at last I wrote that I would not read any of their official emails any more because they only led to more problems, two of the other board members made clear that I had hurt them terribly and had said horrible things. One of them, whom I had befriended, saw this as a reason not to want to talk to me any more, ever.
This landed me in a situation that I could make head nor tails of.
They were the offended party? Because I said that in effect they had fired me? One suggested that I behaved as a victim when I was none, and that the facts were quite different from what I had said.
The more I thought of it, the more I became convinced that I did not draw the wrong conclusions, nor had said anything that was factually wrong. Maybe the use of the word "fired" was a bit dramatic. You could argue that with volunteer work you can't fire someone. I disagree. In general, and in this case. Furthermore I think that imprudence in communication lies not only with me. In fact they could have prevented things from going ugly by having someone else communicate with me, and doing so in a less formal and legal way. There was no need for formality in my opinion. I didn't object to leaving, nor was there any reason to be cautious about responsability. So why did they choose to communicate with me in the worst possible form, excluding all others? Why couldn't they try to leave the question of who was responsable for my leaving open, as I did initially?
The worst of it is that I can't let go. I did stop reading their emails or writing back.
But every day I worry about how this came to be, what I had done, why they feel as they apparently do. My therapist offered to read the emails to see where I might have misunderstood them. But I am hesitant to go there. We have spoken about the first one the chair person wrote. Because of the positive interpretation of it my therapist gave, I managed to be magnanamous in my reply. Later I changed my mind and once again was convinced that it couldn't be as positive as she had explained, because the context took away most of what could be construed as positive. The context being what had been said and done previously.
After doubting my view for several days, and as I calmed down a bit, I began to see more and more basis for what I had read and concluded from their emails. I did not draw the wrong conclusions. And if they did not mean what I had read in their correspondence, they should have written it quite differently.
Can I be so wrong? I am wrong? Am I the only one who is wrong? Am I wrong because of my autism, or am I just stupid? And why did they choose not to take my autism into account whem writing me? I can't see they did, but maybe they are convinced that did.