I have a headache and I am grumpy about it. I have received a couple of incredibly shitty emails, and I’m grumpy about that. And someone whom I trusted to do some important work hasn’t done it, and I’m grumpy about that too.

Normally I’d say that I don’t know why I bother, but given that I do bother, I thought I should talk a bit about why.

The first thing is because I am driven to take responsibility for things. I have inklings about where that comes from, but they’re not for the here and the now. The point is that I have an urge to be responsible. With that urge comes the desire to be better at it. Being a responsable is something you can get better at. It is also something that for me, as a white man, that people will let me get away with not being better at. I have to be thoughtful of that, as I go about doing things.

As I’ve got better at it, I’ve become more driven to do it. This is because we all retreat into what we’re good at. Some people retreat into analysis and some to action; some to detail and some to broad strokes. But it’s also frustrating to see something being done badly when you know you could do it well.

With every new responsibility I collect, I get harder problems. I get stakeholders who are bruised and battered by poor execution and well-meant but ultimately impossible promises. I get folks who are feeling the way I do: that they could do it better, but they’re so snarled up in the context and the history of the problem that they can’t escape it. I get people who believe that the entire thing is doomed, and they’re so apathetic that they’re unwilling to engage with the possibility of hope.

All of these are live situations. Every single fuck-up I make, and I know I’m going to make some, is going to make someone else’s life harder. Some of the choices I purposefully make are going to be harder for some people than others. I still have to make them. Someone still has to make them.

I think being a leader, and being a visible leader, has got significantly harder in recent years. I remember working in the office of a senior leader in my organisation, and being absolutely boggled by the disrespectful way she was spoken to. And this is an organisation that, let’s be honest, is politer than most. Some of the emails I’ve had recently, since taking on a voluntary leadership role, have been really incredible. Somewhere along the line, people seem to have completely lost track of how to communicate. Somewhere along the line, people stopped seeing people as people but as non-player characters; irritants that have to be negotiated to get to their objectives.

The skillset required to navigate this space gets larger every year, gets harder. And not just the external skills: I am finding myself looking for more and more resources about emotional self-regulation. I find myself finding peers in weird places. I have to be reminded that enforcing boundaries is a means of self-protection and not a means of controlling others; that I can’t stop people being unkind to me; that the only thing to do is take myself out of the situation even when the unkindness is valid. I can’t owe 1,000 people myself; I can’t honour 500 hurt feelings.

And I think that goes in the other direction too. When I have to be strict with people, and point out that work that was promised hasn’t been done, I can’t hold the space for that person to be upset even though that feeling is valid. That feeling is caused by them not having done the work, and all I can do is deliver that message in the kindest way possible.

I think there’s something here about vocations, about callings. I don’t do these things because they’re easy or because I enjoy them but because they satisfy me. They speak to the small voice within that says: This. This is a thing that is Good.

I don’t know how else to describe it.