February 25, 2017 — On Throwing in the Proverbial Towel

For some reason, I always thought the hardest thing to do in student politics was to run for a position. You have to make posters, create a platform, mingle with people to get their vote, constantly smiling and always optimistic about the outcome, no matter how much it’ll rip your insides out if you lose. When you’re running for a position, you have a fire, an end goal that you’re working towards. Whether it be a resume padding, or a desire to make a genuine effort to represent your constituency, there is something driving you to get those votes and get elected. I realize now, almost a year into my term that all of that was so easy and nothing compared to what it would actually be like during my time as a director.

The first few meetings are arguably the best, people are still getting to know one another and talking about what they want to accomplish throughout the year. Maybe it’s because the term starts in the summer, and people treat it like a summer fling — fun, until the real-world sets in and you start to get to know one another too well. The meetings that follow is when the nitty gritty starts to happen; name-calling, arguments on what needs to be done and what isn’t important, questions on whether people are using equity for their own agenda or if they do genuinely see X as a problem toward marginalized students. You become paranoid, constantly trying to figure out agendas and what the down-low gossip is. It seeps into your everyday thoughts and you find yourself questioning the relationships you’ve crafted far before you got involved in the student politics scene. From that moment, onward, It’s all downhill.

You do make friends, thank God, which is literally what you need in places like this, people that will have your back and aren’t going to stay silent when you’re being treated unfairly. Even if they are silent in the moment, they’ll be your shoulder to cry on or personal cheerleader in those moments of “I’m tired” and “I want this to end”. Support isn’t always standing on a chair in defence of you at a meeting, sometimes it’s a message in the morning, trying to coax you out of bed and encouraging you to get ready for another day of fighting. When you have so many smart and passionate individuals in one room, there is bound to be disagreements and that is not always a bad thing. It may mean things take longer to get done, or even the smallest things turn into arguments that draw on for months in and out of the meeting room; but there is nothing worse than a complacent board, that is at the beck and call of the executives and is willing to do everything they want you to. That isn’t to say that if you do agree with what they want, you shouldn’t do it — it just means that being critical is not the worst of things to be in this sort of climate.

Maybe we do forget that we came here to do something, that we wanted this position for a reason. I think I’ve forgotten why I ran for this position in the first place. Which brings us to the actual title of this “document” or whatever you want to call it. Throwing in the proverbial towel: resignation. I had a student that I represent comment to me that they felt my absence at the meeting place of most of my constituents, that they hadn’t seen me at any meetings that the constituency council holds. At first I was baffled, what kind of statement was that? The bylaws do not stipulate that I must interact with the constituency council, not does it say that I must be contact with my constituents at all time. After a period of scoffing and shaking my head, I realized how selfish I had been about this whole thing. I had convinced myself that I knew what they all wanted, that I knew best; and only in a moment of crisis did I realize I hadn’t been doing my job at all.

That’s when I first started to grapple with the question, do I resign? Do I stay the two months that I have left, do a half assed job of it and then be “free”? So many questions were running through my mind, and not one of them painted me in a good light. It made me feel like I really had taken the spot of a passionate student who would have done a far better job. What did I have to show for my efforts? I attended every meeting, ran for and got elected onto a bunch of committees, met with members of other organizations to try and work on academic policy reforms, mental health initiatives, and organized various events with the constituency council. Except they were right, I was never there. My mind was always elsewhere, thinking about something else I was supposed to do later, what kind of event we needed to address whatever else problem we had on campus, what kind of fundraiser X group is doing for Y issue and how I can help, which rooms need to be booked and what kind of equipment was necessary for the event to take place.

I realized then in horror, that while my mind was elsewhere, the students around me may have been dropping hints about something not being right at the college, or they needed something and were wondering if there was something the Union could do from a different perspective. The sinking suspicion that I was not doing my job properly sat in my stomach like a rock, and it’s still there. While I was thinking about myself, and about how members of the constituency council had wronged me, how administration had made my job harder, I missed those moments, those cries for help. No matter how much I talk about being there for my constituency, how much I want to advocate for their rights — does it matter if I never picked up on queues they were sending me?

At what point am I supposed to admit that I wasn’t the right person for this job and quit?

I had thought that if I sat down and wrote this, I would have a clear idea by the end of it as to what I want to do: to resign or not to resign, that has and always will be until the 1st of May, the question. Even though I don’t know if it’s time to throw in the towel yet, but what I do know is that I’ll never be the optimistic 20-year-old I once was when I ran for this position; and I honestly don’t know if that’s a good thing anymore.