Organizer Personality Disorder?

Getting out of the bubble

Organizing is intense. Union organizing is especially intense. I have said that running a union campaign or strike is the closest thing to being at war without being at war. Maybe that’s part of why I identify so much with people who are at war.

One of the best organizers I ever worked with called the intensity of an organizing campaign being “in the bubble.” Everything else fades away. You are in constant contact with your coworkers. We used to say, “One brain.” We think with one brain.

I was an organizer for the first twenty years of my adult life. For most of that time I was a Director of Organizing, and unlike many with that title, I led most of the campaigns myself. I never stopped talking to workers. Rarely did a day go by that I did not talk to the workers. I had many a long rant about talking to workers. If you don’t want to talk to the workers, get out of the room.

Organizing is intense, but it is ideal in some ways for an anxious person. If you are the kind of person who is constantly seeing catastrophe over every little hill and bump, you are dysfunctional in regular life. But in union organizing, the slightest change in someone’s behavior means the boss got to them. So your hyper-vigilence is super adaptive!

Organizing is largely about human connection. You have to connect with the workers at a level that is so profound that they trust you to lead them through a process that may result in them losing their jobs, their houses, their relationships with coworkers. It doesn’t matter if the fact is that nurses rarely get fired during an organizing campaign: the fear is real. Never minimize the fear.

Organizers rarely get time off. I used to joke but I was not joking that I could not get married because I couldn’t plan a wedding because you never know when a campaign will start or an election will be scheduled. For years, I told nurses that I could meet them anytime, any place, and I meant it. I did it. I sat in a lot of diners waiting for people who didn’t show up. A waitress named Melissa added about $300 per month to her tip income because I had to sit in a Denny’s three times a day waiting for nurses to come by before and after work.

Most of my organizing career came before texting. That is good. I got a repetitive stress injury from texting on my Blackberry almost immediately after texting became a thing. I would be up in the middle of the night texting with night shift nurses and other healthcare workers.

When you are organizing, you are in constant contact with your team members. It gives you a very unhealthy perspective on life, really, because they become closer to you than your own family or other friends. But I don’t regret it. I don’t regret any of the years I spent doing that work.

What I notice is that it’s hard to adapt to “real” life. I wonder if veterans feel the same way. I have heard that they do. They miss the intense camaraderie with their fellow soldiers. You never feel so close to someone as when you are in a fox hole.

In the years since I left labor organizing, I’ve developed some more calm, stable ways of living. Meditating, exercising, getting back to religious services of various kinds. But I miss the rush, the intensity. I would not go back to it - I’m too old for that blank, as they say - but I loved it.

Texting has given us a way to crawl into a bubble with people we’ve never met, people far away, or people we’ve just met. We can create the intensity of almost living together by being in constant text contact. I have railed against this phenomenon and even wrote part of a book on a contract about it. I try not to text other than logistically. I fail.

I would like to know if other people feel like they get over the intensity of organizing. I tend to connect very powerfully with people, but often find that I’m a bit “too much.”

The obvious answer is that I should go fight in the IDF, but I don’t think they’d take me, I can’t leave my mom and my cat, and I’ve got some good stuff going on in my life right now.

I read a very interesting blog in Girls called “Maybe You’re Not Anxiously Attached.” I highly recommend this piece and the entire blog.

I think I am anxiously attached a lot of the time. Yet I am driven crazy by people who text me constantly (I still love you though.)

It’s a struggle to become “normal” when you spent most of your formative years as an adult in a bubble.

I think it is also hard to be fundamentally single with no family close by. I have a very dear friend close by whom I see about once a week, but most of my close friends are far away. Hello New York, Boston, Oregon, Florida, Los Angeles, Oakland, Israel! My mom and I want to find a place where we can live closer together (but not live together!) We were happiest when we had cute little apartments with matching Hello Kitty bathrooms (the shower curtain, the bathmat, absolutely everything Hello Kitty!) in the same apartment complexes. We will get there.

I have a playlist called “A Girl I Met” that starts with the song “Hold on Loosely.” I am terrible at holding on loosely, but I believe I can learn.

I don’t want to be so close to anyone that I block out the rest of the world. My dear mentor Stanton Peele wrote about that the year and month I was born in this article.

But I do miss closeness, and I miss intensity. I am madly attracted to people who are intense, people who get colloquially called crazy. I love passion, synergy, what we used to call running and gunning in organizing but I don’t think I’d use that term anymore.

Balance, young Padawan. Balance.

I’m working on it.

Tulips: The Balanced Life