How the Absence of Love Led Me to Quit

what happens if we demand love be present in every facet of our lives, even and including in our workplace.

Before I get to the story, I want you to know that, for this post, I am changing things up a little, a quick pivot from themes of travel-and-spirituality to themes of love-and-justice.

Context: With a broken heart, I quit my job as a civil rights attorney last year. Since then, I have spent many days writing and cataloging my experiences, trying to make sense of what I have learned about love, justice, and liberation.

I hope you enjoy. Please stay for the guided meditation at the end.

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I used Canva to create yet another giggle-inducing collage! Here’s my head being weighed against a feather on the scales of justice, featuring falling dominoes, tumbling legal treatises, and a background of a building with the lettering: COURT.

I pitied my boss for being on the other end of my self-righteousness.

“To feel like you belong is to feel safe. When you work within an environment where you do not feel like you truly belong, do not feel like you’re safe to be your authentic self, where you do not feel protected by your team…”

My pity was not reticence, it did not stop me from raising my voice to reach her. I could not control my tone. My speech quickened, ramped to the pace of a lecture, deepened with certainty,

“…it affects the integrity of our work, the quality of our clients’ representation, all of our mental health, our relationships. I don’t think I can exaggerate how important a sense of belonging is to the quality of work we do. It’s fundamental.”

I sucked in my air after my soliloquy, waiting for my boss to tell me I was correct, that she would help me make changes.

I could feel my boss’ chin tuck to her neck on the other end of the phone. I heard her take a step back from me.

When she finally responded, with an exasperated sigh, she said “This is a deeper emotional response than I was prepared for, Tifanei. I just do not feel equipped for this.”

Her words deflated me. I was sharing how deeply I disagreed with her perspective on the function of our team—“a team in name only,” I had called it. I was trying to lay bare how the impoverished dynamic was impacting me and others.

Because her role was to set organizational goals, expectations, and incentives, I felt she needed to share responsibility for the flailing dynamics of our team. And because some of her decisions spliced up our resources and regularly shuffled our precarious hierarchy, I felt like we needed her. “In our current structure, despite my title as co-lead, I do not have the requisite power and influence to do this alone,” I had insisted.

I wanted her to understand how harmful the unaddressed conflicts had become on top of the already painful reality of the social justice and civil rights work we did together—we were litigating high-profile cases about some of the most egregious government actions taken against human beings, and our team members weren’t even on speaking terms.

For me, the avoidance was crazy-making. The conflict-avoidant culture of our firm, especially paired with our win-above-all-else legal strategies, incentivized people to pummel through work and each other, in a way that was damaging to our psychological health. I was not the only one who felt alone and exhausted. We all felt it.

If we cannot take care of one another, if we cannot and do not desire to truly see each other, then we cannot love each other, I reasoned. And if we cannot love each other, then what is the point of liberatory work? What is victory or liberation without love?

I felt desperate—truly desperate—for our non-profit firm to see the futility of our justice-based visions of the future if love was absent from our daily interactions. And desperate for us to prioritize mending our interpersonal fractures; for us to want more for and from us as a team, as a collective, and as individuals.

(Note to other attorneys: Yes, I sincerely meant we should prioritize the health of our relationships above our active litigation deadlines. We are legally entitled to filing-extensions—why not use them.)

But my boss was clearly telling me this was not in her wheelhouse, nor did she want it to be, as well as not-so subliminally telling me to talk to my therapist instead.

Her dismissive posture took shape into a billowing shadow, wisps in the stale air around me, and then the shadow whispered to me, translated her words for me: She thinks if you are the only one who believes there is still conflict that needs to be addressed on your team then you are the conflict, you are the problem.

I huffed in response to her unspoken words.

Over the next days, I joined a pre-scheduled video call with my colleague.

At odds with the old crone sitting in my belly, advising me to “hush, child,” I lamented the emotional-illiteracy I experienced on the phone call with our boss.

My colleague folded his hands together as he cast his eyes down, nodded his forehead rhythmically in the direction of his knees as he listened to me speak.

His body language told me that he was only tolerating my perspective, holding it for further consideration with wiser counsel, closed off to identifying with me in any vulnerable way, and feeling a sense of danger in allyship with me.

“And rather than hear what I was trying to say about how our team has failed, she acted as if my perspective was simply a tell-tale sign that I need to call my therapist,” I puffed more air, thinly hoping if I kept talking, kept explaining myself, he might eventually side with me, that he would eventually see how critical my perspective was for our relationship.

Instead, as you might imagine, my colleague raised his brows into the video conference camera. He shifted his eyes just far enough to the corners of his nose to tell me that not only did he already know the details of the conversation I had with our boss, but that him and her had both consulted and consoled one another about it in my absence.

In the moment, I pretended not to notice the secreted details of his facial expression. But such pretending was worthless—the information was already coursing through my body, triggering doubt and shame and an even greater fatigue.

These conversations, with him and with her, were not the last straw—there’s so, so much more, but they were a pair of falling dominoes destining the last domino piece to collapse very soon.

Because in the next months, I would decide to take a prolonged leave-of-absence and then eventually resign—not just from my job, but from the legal profession altogether.

Tell me: what do you think?

I think about my own need for accountability, too. Maybe after everything I had endured as a Black woman attorney litigating against institutions hell-bent on erasing my people; a legal career chock-a-block full of racialized- and sexualized-trauma, feeling isolated, overworked, underpaid, and swimming up streams of grief; perhaps my sense of worthiness was just tattered—painfully frayed like the scaled wings of a moth dancing too close to the flame.

And if I did not feel like I was worthy, then could I have ever felt like I belonged? Ever felt safe? Ever felt loved?

Was/is love even available in civil justice work? Do we, as a collective, even know where to begin to define love? Are there places we must all concede love cannot exist?

I invite you, tell me…

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Guided Meditation

Each story we create, share, and consume has the power to change each of us at any time; allow them to, but do so responsibly. This guided meditation was created to support your integration.