I have authority over people all day, which complicates this
Posted as careful_with_power
- Looking for
- someone who understands why I am careful about leading
- Experience
- Twenty years, both directions, and a long think about both.
- Around
- the 18th, Paris
I work in social services and I make decisions about people who have no power to refuse them. That is the job, it is necessary, and it has made me extremely careful about what I do with authority in the rest of my life.
Fifty three, Paris, switch, twenty years. For about eight of those I did not lead at all, deliberately, because I could not find a way to enjoy it that did not feel like an extension of my working day. I have come back to it slowly and on very different terms, and it is now the part I find most interesting, precisely because it is nothing like work: everybody involved can leave, everybody agreed, and the whole thing rests on consent that is real rather than administrative.
What I want is one person, over years, with both directions available. I follow with people who are calm and specific. I lead with people who want a light and attentive hand and who will tell me the moment something is wrong.
What I do not want is anybody who wants to be genuinely powerless, or who talks about consent as a formality to get past. I have seen what actual powerlessness does to people and I have no appetite for a performance of it.
I am in the north of the city, I live alone, my hours are regular and I am free most evenings. I write long and I take a few days sometimes. That is not disinterest, it is a working week that occasionally swallows me.