authority

on sunday we were supposed to have a youth group meeting. normally D runs these meetings, but he was angry with A, so he just dropped her off at church and left her to it. the reason he said he was angry was that A and i are mean and sarcastic and don't take him seriously.

so first of all, i'm never mean to him because we aren't that close and i only tease people i know well and like. A is jokingly mean to him and generally sarcastic, but she's like that with everyone. what D seems to be talking about is the way A and i interact with each other, which mostly involves us giving each other shit. A says D is bad at interpreting context in social interactions, so i think what he's seeing is two people being really unkind to each other, and he's thinking something like, "if someone said something like that to me, i'd be really upset," because he takes everything extremely personally, and can't imagine that anyone else might feel differently.

the other thing is this. when D complains about people not taking him seriously, what he means is that we don't treat him as an authority. but that's because he isn't. our group intentionally has no leadership of any kind. he runs the meetings because he wants to and everyone else is okay with that because it means we don't have to do it, not because he's a leader. when he comes up with an idea, we go along with it if we like it, not because we have to.

he doesn't understand this, though. i do because i dealt with this exact situation during occupy. i often facilitated general assemblies because i was there a lot and i was good at it. i didn't have any authority then either - i was just volunteering to do a job and everyone else agreed that i was good at that job so i was allowed to do it. i feel like your understanding of your role in a group informs the way you carry out that role. so, D thinks he's our leader, and he wants people to do what he says and admire him just because he's the leader, and he gets upset when people criticize him or don't go along with him. i was never under this impression at occupy, so as long as people weren't actually rude to me i didn't really care how they behaved. and peer pressure takes care of a lot of disruptive behavior, because nobody likes the guy who thinks he's giving a lecture or the guy who interrupts people he disagrees with.

anyway, so i ran the meeting sunday because A didn't want to. there were only 4 of us anyway and one guy left pretty early. but we had a good discussion and we might have gotten two new members. we'll see who shows up at the wednesday social event.

i suggested to A yesterday that i should just run all the discussion meetings since D doesn't like doing it. since he's not the leader, there's no reason for him to do work he doesn't like and isn't good at if someone else can do it. she said she'd mention it to D. that was last night, so i guess today i'll find out what's going on with that. i predict he'll throw a tantrum and accuse us of trying to shut him out of the group or something, since that's what he does whenever anyone suggests that he might not be totally perfect at everything. that's fine, i guess. it's not like i have to deal with it.