After I poured my heart out here yesterday and then spent an hour in consultation with my husband, who is one of the best listeners I’ve ever met, I came to a near revelatory conclusion:

“You were mishandled. Badly. And your rising frustration was completely understandable to everyone you’ve shared this with except the person who mishandled you. Leave it with the council in charge of overseeing these kinds of things. You trust them to be wise and thoughtful people. If they find that you were totally out of line, you can reassess at that time, but for now, rest easy. Rest in what you know.”

Some background: I asked for a hiatus from an ‘in person’ group I am a part of. I have been intensely flaky with attendance because I have been intensely busy trying to get WPS off the ground, an e-course written, and my coaching training done. There is a lot of ‘in and out’ activity in this group & I know it bugs me when people only seem to show up when they feel like it, so I decided not to be a hypocrite and take advantage of what seemed like ill-defined attendance boundaries. I also said that I would understand if a hiatus wasn’t possible and would withdraw my membership, but asked if I could rejoin at a later date.

I never got a straight answer. I got a ‘if you attend, you’re a member. If you don’t, you’re not.”

I wondered about what that meant. Did that mean ‘No’? Did that mean ‘Yes’? I was confused. I was also feeling the sting of ‘wait…it’s okay for <insert five names of people who come and go as they please> but it isn’t okay for me?

I admit, I took it personally, but this group matters to me so instead of just wandering off all desolate like, I wrote back and asked for clarification. If this was the case for me and not the others who had attendance issues, could this be personal? Was I being rejected? I was certainly feeling rejected.

It devolved from there and ended up with my feeling so frustrated that I decided to resign. I mean, really. It’s a simple fucking question. The runaround was triggering as hell and my head was sore from banging my head against the stone wall. I was happy to leave it at that. Okay, not happy, exactly, but I felt no ill will. I felt no need to take it any further. It was what it was – either this person was deplorably bad at email communication, or I was just a lot of inconvenient noise, or she didn’t quite know how to come right out and say “please fuck off.”

After I resigned? I got The Parting Shot. The barb aimed at my tender bits as I tried to take my leave with my dignity intact. The clouds parted. The sun shone down on my poor twisty head. Trumpets sounded. I got it.

See, it’s been my experience that when someone cares about you and you are seriously wrong, they don’t have the desire to deliver that parting shot. They might pity you. They might shake their head sadly as you’re walking out the door but a person who knows they’ve got a leg to stand on generally doesn’t have any desire to shoot yours out from underneath you. It’s often the case that only when when people have a reason to feel defensive (or they really do *not* give a shit about you to begin with) that they, as you are admitting defeat, take aim, and send a poison arrow your way as you’re walking out the door.

I read ‘the parting shot’ and I laughed. My emotional investment disappeared. I wasn’t dealing with someone who gave a crap. I was dealing with someone for whom I was an inconvenient noise. My faith in her was ill-placed. And for some reason this brought me to a place of peace. I got it. This wasn’t personal in the sense that I was broken or damaged or too difficult to deal with. This was simply a matter of not being very important to this person. She was just not that into me, as the book says, and THAT I could live with. In fact, that was all I needed to know, you know? Perhaps this was an inconvenient truth for her to deal with, but it was perfectly all right for me.

I sent off the entire email exchange to the appropriate body of administrators (her parting shot included a dire warning that I would be reported to said council, so I did what I had to do to protect myself) and I washed my hands of it. I surrendered to what I know. I don’t trust this woman to be straight with me, and after giving her repeated opportunities to be straight with me and getting no where, the only reasonable response is to withdraw my emotional investment and take my leave.

It was a very peaceful feeling. It washed over me in waves of ‘it’s all okay’ and instead of over-analyzing it, I let it be, and I moved on, and whatever the final outcome is, I’m good with it. I could be kicked out of an organization that means a lot to me. That is the worse case scenario. I can live with that because with or without the organization itself, what I need, I already have.

I learned a very valuable lesson from this entire thing. My gut is rarely wrong. It knows who to trust and if my gut is telling me something is off, or fishy, or not quite what it seems? I should pay heed.