20 Seconds of Courage Helped Me End 2 Years Of Misery

[CheshireCrab]

So this is something that has been bothering me for a while and I never feel like I can truly get it off my mind until I share this 2-year problem I've been dealing with.

 

*Deep Breath*

 

4 Years Ago

 

About 4 years ago I enrolled in a University that has a sort of "culture" unlike many other Universities. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, 90% of our classes are held in the evening and online. This is because the majority of our students are working a full-time jobs and can really only do classes after their 9-5 day jobs. In fact, a lot of these same students are already working the very jobs their majoring in and mainly getting their degrees for either a pay raise or to move up in their current position.

 

Fast forward to the beginning of my Sophomore year when I joined the Computer Science club(actually had a different name but it was so wordy no one ever called it that). When I first joined, I met a few nice people and even got to learn a couple of things. The experience was very enjoyable, but at the time it was a 2 hour bus ride to campus so making the weekly meetings was very difficult to do. I made an appearance very sporadically but it wasn't until I was able to attend figure out faster transportation I was not a regular attendee.

 

About halfway through my Sophomore year I stayed in touch with some of the club members and one in particular, who we shall call Cee, reached out to me to see how I was doing. Cee is a nice person and I did enjoy talking to her. Eventually, Cee told me that the CS club has been dwindling in Officers due to graduating or just leaving the club all together. In order to remain as a club we needed 4 Officers minimum. She asked if I wanted to be an officer of the club(Despite the fact I showed up for a total of 3 meetings prior to this) and I thought "What the heck, would look good on a resume". I asked what I needed to do, and she said "Nothing". This really should've been my first red flag.

 

 

As an "Officer" of the club I had this obligated feeling that I should be doing something to benefit it. So, during my leisure, I would attend meetings from other clubs and see how they function and contrast it with the CS' club meetings. There are 2 things I learned since embarking on this endeavor:

 

1. The CS Club meets very sporadically. When they do meet, sometimes it's just a couple of people who show up.

2. There are a lot of clubs at this University, but very little club members who attend them.

 

I actually talked with the VP of one of these clubs who told me that our University is not like many others, and it's very difficult to get people to regularly attend meetings due to their busy lives. That was something, at the time, I thought could be easy to overcome if the club was at least interesting enough for people to attend.

 

As I got into my junior year Cee has been spamming a bunch of e-mails to all the club officers talking about recruitment. A lot of the officers we have our graduating so it'll really be me and one other Officer who will be there at the end of the semester. Cee was very liberal when it came to giving people an Officer position. While a lot of the clubs held elections, Cee would simply give someone the position if they remotely showed interest in it. Because of this, we had plenty of Officers but none of whom did anything. 

 

I thought it was a waste of an opportunity to be a club but not do anything worth anyone's time. I tend spent a weekend pooling ideas from other successful Computer Science clubs in other Universities than provided that list to Cee and the other Officers. Cee was really the only one to respond and finally gave me a title to the club(Now known as Secretary).

 

 

Big Changes

 

We exchanged e-mails for a number of months and planned to actually do stuff with the club. As this progressed we started losing the inactive Offices and Cee started to get a lot more aggressive towards the Officers who did help out. Eventually one of the Officers, who I'll named Rob( who I really liked and did a lot for the club) had a fight with Cee over a very minor thing(He showed up for a meeting that was cancelled at the last minute and e-mailed saying he'll be free to hang out if anyone wanted to join). I still kept in touch with him and told him that Cee has been very hard to work with. Many of my ideas were getting shot down for one reason or another, most of which were for very ludicrous reasons.

 

Finally I just decided to wait until Cee graduates so she can no longer qualify as an Officer and not have access to 90% of our club's resources. Time came, Cee graduated, I quickly revoked and transitioned her permissions to be shared among the remaining officers of the club.  Rob, and I all started to discuss our ideas for the club and spent the better part of Summer hashing things out. During this Summer Rob took up the role of VP and I took up the role of President. I really did not want this position but Rob was insisted on it. We also changed the requirements for the Officer position so people had to be elected to get the position.

 

Admittedly it was hard to organize all of our paperwork given organizing a club is a 4 person job and there were only 2 of us. However, we managed to spend the better part of Summer getting our paperwork organized and got everything planned for the fall. Fall went pretty well. We, as expected, did not have regular attendees but we did have plenty of events with people showing up more than other clubs usually do. The fall semester ended and we still had a large number of events/activities we wanted to do for the Spring semester. At this point Rob has graduated but still helped out with the club. To our mistake, we forgot to host Officer Elections during the Fall Semester.

 

We ended up having Fall elections towards the end and got 1 more Officer, Ash. We tried to plan out regular club meetings but only Rob and I could really show up because it conflicted with Ash's class schedule. We still had a much shorter amount of time to plan out for the Spring semester and, as such, didn't get everything we wanted hashed out for the upcoming semester. We took a look at what we wanted to do and realized that the upcoming semester will involve having to make some budget requests.

 

 

Now, at the time, we got by the Fall Semester without making a budget request. If it cost money we either paid out of our own pocket or only attended free events. We did not want to do budget requests because it's a lot of paper work to request something even as little as a pack of pencils. Plus, the budget requests had a lot of rules to them. They had to be filled out months in advance to even be considered for approval and can easily get rejected if we aren't extremely specific about our item/event. We also were hesitate because Cee has submitted several questionable budget requests prior, all of which got denied, and gave the club a bad impression to the budget committee.

 

However, for the Spring semester we wanted to be project-oriented. We gathered some information and filled out the budget paperwork while also juggling the vast amount of other paper work and event planning for our club. At this point, Rob and I were easily spending 10-20 hours a piece on the club and Rob was already trying to find a job. Meanwhile I still had school and work and the stress of the club alone was making me sick often. Our budget proposals were either denied or marked as pending. Eventually, Rob left the club and it was just me handling the club for the semester.

 

I tried to manage the club activities but it became impossible to juggle 20 hours of club activities, work, and school. Running the club ended up affecting my school work and I had to withdraw from all but one of my Spring courses. I was growing tired of the constant stress of the club with little payout coming from it. I hated being part of this club and for the entire summer I completely ignored anything related to it. I didn't want this club to fade away, but it felt like no matter how much work I was putting into it, I was getting no where.

 

Moving Forward

 

Than the fall semester of my Senior year happened. Ash, now the new VP of the club, sent me an e-mail telling me she wanted to see the club become successful. Because it was just the two of us, we spent the majority of the Fall semester planning out for the Spring semester. Things were looking up. I thought, even though I am going to be graduating soon, I can at least help out enough so Ash has more officers to delegate the tasks with and I can hand off to the club to her without it being a burden.

 

This is when I got an e-mail from Cee. Cee told me she is coming back to the University for a 2nd degree and wanted to be involved with the club. I told Ash about Cee and she was understandably hesitate on making her an officer. We told her about the new requirements to be an Officer, but she did not seem to acknowledge them. Cee got to the point of consistently e-mailing us asking to be an Officer and kept asking us about our budget. At least once a month she dropped a name of a new student(None of which we knew of) whom she claimed to be interested in becoming an Officer. Ash and I started to ignore her e-mails as her constant requests to be an Officer and asking us about our budget started to become suspicious.

 

Towards the end of the semester we already had a lot of our events for the Spring planned out and the appropriate paperwork filled. We thought to at least let Cee help out since she seemed so eager. We created a new position for her. Cee would essentially be in charge of finding and testing new tools for club members and advertise our club's meetings. We made it clear to her that this was not an Officer position and she'll just be handling these duties. She replied back to us demanding that we make it an Officer position and wanted one of her associates to also become an officer.

 

 

We did not reply back to her and Ash and I both agreed it'll best to not give her Officer rights. At this point she started to become aggressive. Whenever we hosted online meetings she'll complain about how she didn't understand how to use it and insisted we use a different one. When she did join the meeting she'll ask about becoming an Officer. She eventually sent a text to Ash, myself, and several others a Slack Channel she said the CS club will be using(This was never approved by either Ash or I).

 

Despite Cee's overbearing desire to be an Officer, Ash and I were optimistic about our scheduled events. We had a number of activities and meetings set-up and planned to gradually include more events as things progressed. Then we got an e-mail from the head of the University's clubs. She understood that there were some issues with us and Cee and wanted to meet with Ash and I about what was going on. I couldn't attend the meeting due to classes and it seemed like rescheduling it was not possible.

 

The End Of An Era

 

Our first major event was coming up, an Off-Campus event where one of the Co-Founders of Apple would be doing a presentation. This event was very popular among people and we had a lot of students RSVP within an hour of setting it up.

 

A few days after Ash met with the head, the head sent out an e-mail to everyone who RSVP'd to an event we had coming up in a few weeks. The head has informed us that she is freezing our club from doing any events until we attend a mandatory meeting to talk about the status of the club. Just like that, all our hard work was put on hold and the head has publicly shamed us for trying. At this point I was thinking to myself "What am I really gaining from this? Is it really worth the 10-20 hours of week and constant feeling of stress?". The answer was pretty obvious, and it seemed obvious a really long time ago. I was just afraid that quitting would made me look like a failure. Thinking about that now seems absolutely ridiculous.

 

 

So I took a page from Kamb's teachings and built up 20 seconds of courage to send a message to Ash. I told her I no longer felt comfortable with the club. I no longer wanted to be a part of the club and the stress and drama became too much for me to handle. She responded back that she completely understood this and felt the same way. She stuck with the club simply because she wanted me to graduate as the president. I also learned when Ash met with the club head it was not to discuss Cam but often was about her belittling my leadership abilities as well as calling me lazy. Ash defended me each time I was brought up, and I thanked her for that. I told her I was feeling a lot better about resigning knowing she is planning on opting out too and will not carry the burden that has been this club. I sent an e-mail out to the club head telling her I do not plan on attending the mandatory meeting and will stepping back from the club.

 

And that's it. what felt like 2 years of absolute misery ends with just 20 seconds of courage. It feels like a huge weight off of my shoulders and it also inspires me to start stepping back from taking on more obligations. Just because I do not succeed in something doesn't mean I'm a failure for life, some things are just not worth the overbearing amount of stress and work that comes with it. I am going to start saying no more instead of taking on more than I should be handling.

 

This was definitely one huge set-back I am glad to put behind me.

[DyDy]

Good job! Sometimes we need to burn some bridges in order to lift the weight from our shoulders.