It was a long time ago now, about fifteen years, when I burned out of Alpha Phi Omega and went on whatever we called a leave of absence from it (was it "becoming an associate member"?), ultimately to quit altogether, to some extent probably to my own surprise as well as that of not a few others. I had been so into the fraternity, sophomore year, that my parents paid dues for lifetime-member status for me (not crazily expensive, don't worry) at some point as a Christmas gift, though I don't remember whether it was in that year or the part of my junior year where I hadn't quit yet. I'd leapt from pledge to secretary to Vice President of Service, gone through most of LEADS training, lived and breathed APO to a pretty large extent.
But the problems had begun when I became an officer. I came to realize that being a member of an organization and helping to lead that same organization are two very different experiences. Membership is fun and meaningful. Leadership is work, and much less fun. It's much easier to burn out of leadership than membership, or at minimum to become disillusioned. And that's what happened with me as far as APO, for reasons you could probably read about in this blog's archives (if you wanted to, and I'm not saying you should).
I remembered that "leadership is a different experience" lesson to some extent in InterVarsity and beyond, but I will say that the experience of leadership in a Christian organization usually felt different from that. I was on Good Shepherd's vestry for a few years, but though there was certainly small-scale drama, and though I put plenty of time into serving the church, it had the vast advantages of a commonly-shared, commonly-lived set of values and (I believe) the work of the Holy Spirit, and the whole thing just went better.
So I wasn't thinking about any of that when I took a job at work that's basically a leadership position. I was thinking about wanting to stay at Bristol. I was thinking about what it and its faculty and fellow staff and students stand for in my imagination and, well, my heart. I built a lot of warm colleagueships (is that a word?) over eight years, and I met a lot of students I liked. I like a lot of the differences between our community college and most four-year institutions. I knew we needed a good tutoring program, and I hoped I could help make sure the college had one. I didn't think it would be easy, per se, but it was a challenge I cared about and felt more or less up to.
Now I'm in a job where, instead of bringing happy tidings of grant funding and equal-footing faculty/staff collaboration, I have to make up rules and guidelines and say no to students, tutors, and faculty alike, maybe more often than I get to say yes. I have discovered just how different it is to tell a faculty member no about something they really care about - and let's face it: a lot of times, TRIO wasn't in the position to give a meaningful no to anything faculty wanted to do with their own courses, and/or wasn't something they really cared about, so I didn't have that problem very often before. I am the one now who's pulled into every awkward situation - every student who complains to administration that we didn't support them, every student who thinks they get to take their frustration out on a tutor or desk staffperson, every faculty member who doesn't submit a support request and then wants an embedded tutor the exact minute their Flex Start course begins, every tutor-faculty pairing who are convinced that they know their subject and are an expert team and all I can do is come in like a wrecking ball and destroy everything they've fought so hard to achieve; plus a good half of the awkward situations that my associate dean gets saddled with that are even remotely related, if she feels there are any ripple effects out to tutoring, which she typically does.
I've been in the job for three-and-a-half months, done a zillion things but accomplished what feels like fairly little progress, and can't even estimate the true feelings of my supervisor, who's unfailingly supportive and skilled in management and carefully very kind - but also, it must be said, an odd mix of gentle-and-understanding and candid-yet-hard-to-read and easily-disappointed.
There isn't really a mechanism here for going on associate-member status, and I don't really have anywhere else to go, even assuming I would dare and wouldn't melt into a guilty puddle.
I think I really do love the college as a whole, and the people who work there, and the people it serves. I stayed because of love; I think I chose a harder job out of not just necessity, but love. But like all love becomes, love is hard. I'm a little disoriented, and trying really hard to love, but love is hard.