![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I sent two emails last night, one to the current Associate Clerk -- whether she knows it or not -- the other to the four people on the Ministry & Counsel plus Nominating committee, a more ad hoc structure than that sounds like. In both i noted i would be resigning on 30 June.
I didn't use the term asking for release. If i had had to leave before term was up at my California meeting, i would have asked for release from service. Most, perhaps all, requests were immediately accepted and sent to business meeting. Frequently someone would humorously use the moment for a oh-no-we-cannot-let-you-go in an attempt to communicate the value of the person being released, but the meeting would grant the release. I'd like to think that i would have asked for a support committee and would have met with them to work through any difficulties. I'd like to think that being held in the care of a support committee would be energizing and would have made carrying out the role less challenging, even if it meant more time investment (yet another meeting).
This isn't that meeting, and i suspect the concept would be foreign. So just resigning has the ache of This Isn't What I Thought.
I don't have a sense of "Ah, release!" In part because there are still inner voices dissatisfied with my decision. My center, though, is clear that i am ready to move on.
I think the most critical and hard to answer voice is one that is very legalistic. "You committed to this hard work and you are running away, letting the group down. It's your fault you misunderstood the social contract of how this meeting does business, but you committed. You're breaking your word."
In therapy we touched on the teary feeling i have around this, and connected it back to my mother's constant threats to divorce my father. We touched a little on how because my mother had made it clear that i was just like my father, i probably felt some sense of being abandoned by my mother in those statements. I also think there was another lesson i learned by watching my mother not leave: even if one is miserable, one sticks with the role at hand.
Walking away from the role to take care of myself isn't something i saw modeled.
I didn't use the term asking for release. If i had had to leave before term was up at my California meeting, i would have asked for release from service. Most, perhaps all, requests were immediately accepted and sent to business meeting. Frequently someone would humorously use the moment for a oh-no-we-cannot-let-you-go in an attempt to communicate the value of the person being released, but the meeting would grant the release. I'd like to think that i would have asked for a support committee and would have met with them to work through any difficulties. I'd like to think that being held in the care of a support committee would be energizing and would have made carrying out the role less challenging, even if it meant more time investment (yet another meeting).
This isn't that meeting, and i suspect the concept would be foreign. So just resigning has the ache of This Isn't What I Thought.
I don't have a sense of "Ah, release!" In part because there are still inner voices dissatisfied with my decision. My center, though, is clear that i am ready to move on.
I think the most critical and hard to answer voice is one that is very legalistic. "You committed to this hard work and you are running away, letting the group down. It's your fault you misunderstood the social contract of how this meeting does business, but you committed. You're breaking your word."
In therapy we touched on the teary feeling i have around this, and connected it back to my mother's constant threats to divorce my father. We touched a little on how because my mother had made it clear that i was just like my father, i probably felt some sense of being abandoned by my mother in those statements. I also think there was another lesson i learned by watching my mother not leave: even if one is miserable, one sticks with the role at hand.
Walking away from the role to take care of myself isn't something i saw modeled.
Tags: