Exits
People come, and people go, but no matter how many times it
happens, watching good people leave never gets any easier. It’s
happened to me plenty before, and it’s about to yet again.
I know I don’t deal well with people leaving, because I start throwing hissy
fits. I feel it’s personal, it’s because I’m a bad manager, it’s because I’m
not doing enough. And no amount of saying it’s not personal makes me feel it
isn’t, because I’m arrogant that way. I think it’s impossible that I can’t turn
things around, that I can’t solve problems, that I can’t make conditions
better — but it’s madness to think like that because time and again, people
leave. So it’s humbling, and bit by bit, you learn that what you do doesn’t
define choices. Your influence over others’ career decisions is as marginal as
the shadow cast by a midday sun.
I should be a lot better at dealing with goodbyes, having once spent the better
part of two years in a relationship that seemed to exist only in exotic departure
lounges from Baraja to Dulles. My anxiety is that I never see old faces again,
and the familiar dissolves into the strange. The trajectory of my life since
college brings this fear home — I left Baltimore fully expecting to see the
likes of Cody, Mike, Karen and Christi after summer. It’s been 7 years and
it’ll soon likely be 8. Although by no means living the nomadic existence I perhaps
once led, I still remain a career decision away from a permanent farewell to
every social circle I make.
And therein lies the sting. I know people leave for all sorts of reasons,
including to further their career ambitions. As I get older and see more and
more people flit in and out of my life, I become more and more tempted to
invest less and less in the next social relationship, because I grow ever
certain of its impermanence. At the same time, workplace relationships weigh
more and more because they increasingly become the only real relationships I form,
except that they are just as transient as the next.
This one shook me doubly hard. After the last three, I
thought I’d be numb to departures, but I think now that you don’t feel less,
you just learn to store it away better. I remember the day when I realized D
would leave, I felt an immense sense of shame that we were powerless to keep hold of her. When G
left, I was gutted. When S went back home, I also felt hollow. But when Y told
me she was resigning, I went through every conceivable shade of anger and sadness, before I finally reconciled
myself to the fact (thanks to May’s sensible counsel, naturally). It’s true I
was particularly fond of Y; perhaps, as the boss put it to me, I had lost my
objectivity. Perhaps.
But you learn, and you cope. If you allow departures to
define your relationships as impermanent, and by doing so you thus stop
investing in them, you soon become an empty shell of a man. And no coach,
however talented, produces a prodigy when his heart isn’t in it. So I learn,
and so I cope.
People come, and people go. You wish them the best of luck
and you watch them move on. And then you, too, move on.
