What Working on a Westchester County Political Campaign Taught Me About Unpaid Labor, Leadership, Power, Accountability, Boundaries, and Having the Strength to Close a Cycle By Larnez Kinsey
On August 4, 2026, I received written confirmation from the New York State Board of Elections that my resignation as treasurer of a political campaign in Westchester County had finally been approved.
I stared at one word:
Approved.
Almost immediately, a song started playing in my mind.
“Freedom,” the theme from the 1995 film Panther.
That powerful collective of women’s voices came rushing back into my consciousness. I didn’t choose the song. It chose the moment. Although that letter arrived in August, I had verbally resigned on March 29, 2026. My last involvement in campaign activity was April 2. The paperwork was finally catching up with a decision I had made months earlier. But sitting with that letter, I realized this experience wasn’t only about leaving a political campaign.
It was about leadership. Power. Integrity. Boundaries. And, perhaps most uncomfortably, my own familiar patterns.
I volunteered to wear one hat. Somewhere along the way, I found myself wearing what felt like a thousand. This time, instead of figuring out how to carry them better, I finally put them down.
It Started With Yes
It started simply. Can you help? We need someone we trust. Would you be treasurer? When you’re accustomed to service, you don’t necessarily hear risk. You hear need. And when you’re somebody who knows how to get things done, need can sound a lot like responsibility. So I said yes. Treasurer. One title. One lane. At least, that’s what I thought.
But work doesn’t disappear because nobody has been assigned to do it. It starts looking for somewhere to land. And work has an incredible ability to find the hands already moving. Mine were moving. So I organized. I followed up. I supported events. I managed relationships. I solved problems. I filled gaps. Until one day, I realized the role I had accepted no longer resembled the role I was performing. One hat had become a thousand.
Behind the Curtain
The Wizard of Oz became an unexpected metaphor for what I experienced. Campaigns have a public-facing life. Pictures. Events. Meetings. Community appearances. Announcements. Social media. From the outside, movement can look like infrastructure. It isn’t.
During my time with the campaign, I watched volunteers come and go. Some stayed briefly. Others moved on. I don’t know each person’s reasons for leaving, and I won’t assign motives to decisions that weren’t mine. But eventually, I stopped treating every departure as an isolated event. At some point, turnover stops being an inconvenience and starts becoming information. I spent too much time asking how I could fill the spaces people left behind and not enough time asking why there was always another space to fill.
And strangely, that didn’t initially make me leave. It made me help harder. Something wasn’t getting done? I handled it. Another gap? I filled it. Another problem? I solved it. I didn’t understand yet that every empty space wasn’t necessarily an invitation for me to step into it. It was information I hadn’t learned to read. Because a photograph tells you who showed up. Infrastructure tells you who stayed.
I Was a Volunteer
That distinction matters. My actual employment is with New York State in a maximum-security forensic psychiatric facility. There are weeks when I work 60 to 80 hours. My professional environment requires me to read behavior, recognize escalation, maintain boundaries, make decisions under pressure, and remain composed during crisis.
That’s my paid work. But my life doesn’t end when my shift does. I’m also a wife, a mother of five daughters and a grandmother. I have a family, a home, relationships and people I love who deserve my presence too. So when I say I volunteered for this campaign, I need that word to mean something. I wasn’t giving from an empty calendar. I was giving from an already full life. And still, I showed up. I gave my time. My relationships. My organizational ability. My problem-solving capacity. My energy. Unpaid. I volunteered because I wanted to contribute.
But somewhere along the way, appreciated help began feeling like expected performance. And when expectations exceeded capacity, the conversation could become less about everything being carried and more about what hadn’t been accomplished. That’s when I started hearing about dropping the ball. There is a difference between appreciating someone’s capacity and becoming entitled to it. I had to learn that difference too.
How Many Balls Can One Person Hold?
The phrase “dropping the ball” stayed with me. Because telling somebody they dropped the ball assumes something: That ball belonged in their hands. Treasurer. Catch. Events. Catch. Outreach. Catch. Communications. Catch. Relationships. Catch. Another problem nobody clearly owned. Catch.
Eventually something hits the floor. And everybody looks at the person juggling. You dropped the ball. Well… I’m human. Not Cirque du Soleil. Eventually, I stopped asking how I could become a better juggler. I started asking a better question: Which of these balls were actually mine?
Accountability Requires Context
I can handle accountability. If I make a mistake, tell me. If I agreed to something and didn’t deliver, let’s discuss it. But accountability requires context. Did the person have the information? The resources? The access? The authority? Was the responsibility actually theirs?
There were moments when I felt talked down to. There were interactions I experienced as more diminishing than constructive. And there were expectations around outcomes that I did not believe one volunteer could reasonably control. There is something deeply backwards about quietly compensating for what an organization lacks and then being questioned about what that organization hasn’t accomplished.
Before criticizing the person holding the ball, perhaps leadership should ask: Who threw it? Why was it theirs to catch? And why were so many responsibilities traveling toward the same pair of hands? Sometimes you don’t discover how much invisible labor somebody was providing until they stop providing it.
When Power Starts Outrunning Purpose
Somewhere in all of this, another question started bothering me: What happens when power starts outrunning purpose? Most people enter public service talking about change. Community. Service. Making things better.
But there is a difference between: I want to make a difference, and I need this to go my way. Those are not the same sentence.
I started paying closer attention to leadership under disappointment. Because everybody can look like a leader when the room says yes. Show me what happens when the room says no. How are people spoken to when expectations aren’t met? Is disagreement treated as part of healthy leadership or experienced as disloyalty? Can somebody make a mistake without being made to feel small? Can another person make a decision you dislike without suddenly becoming the problem? Those questions became important to me because of my own experience.
But eventually, the question turned back toward me. What am I willing to normalize because I want somebody to succeed? When does loyalty begin asking me to ignore my own discernment? If I become uncomfortable with a process, how long should commitment to an outcome require me to remain inside it? That question had my name on it.
And my answer became simple: Winning is an outcome. Integrity is a practice. I can lose an outcome and still recognize myself afterward. What I’m no longer willing to do is become so invested in an outcome that I stop listening to myself along the way.
Then I Recognized the Pattern
And this is where I had to stop examining everybody else. Because I knew this pattern. Different room. Different people. Different circumstances. Same pattern. Someone needs something? I step in. There’s a gap? I fill it. Something is falling apart? I stabilize it. More is needed? I give more.
I operate naturally in what I describe as masculine, action-oriented energy. Give me a problem and my instinct is movement. What’s wrong? What needs to happen? What’s the solution? Let’s go.
That quality has served me extraordinarily well. But every strength has a shadow. Sometimes my ability to fix things has prevented me from asking whether they were mine to fix. Sometimes being needed has made it harder for me to recognize when I wasn’t being supported. And sometimes my capacity has kept me in situations longer than I should have stayed.
That was the mirror. Because there is something dangerous about being able to carry enormous amounts while looking completely composed. Competence can hide exhaustion. Efficiency can hide imbalance. And being exceptionally good at functioning inside chaos can make chaos feel normal.
You organize it. You solve it. You make the calls. You fill the gaps. You keep everything moving. Then everybody assumes the system worked. But sometimes the system didn’t work. You did. And when capable people continually compensate for what is missing, their competence can make an unsustainable situation look sustainable.
For a while, I was doing exactly that. I was supplying fuel to something that might otherwise have slowed down and mistaking its continued movement for evidence that the structure itself was working. That realization hurt. Because I couldn’t control how somebody else led. But I could control whether my labor continued making that leadership easier to sustain. That may have been the hardest lesson.
Sometimes the strongest boundary isn’t explaining to someone what they’re doing wrong. Sometimes it is simply removing what you’ve been providing and allowing the structure to reveal what it can actually support without you.
The Universe Will Ask If You Mean It
The universe has a funny way of asking whether you really mean what you’ve been saying. You say you want boundaries? Here comes a situation requiring one. You say you’re done overextending yourself? Here comes another opportunity to overextend. You say you’re finished carrying what doesn’t belong to you? Another ball lands at your feet. Are you going to pick this one up too?
Not every lesson returns because there is something new to learn. Sometimes the lesson returns to see whether you’ll choose differently.
I’ve always known I have the strength to endure. I know how to push through. I know how to survive difficult environments. But endurance wasn’t the assignment this time. Closure was.
Could I say enough and mean enough? Could I allow somebody to be disappointed with me? Could I allow something to remain undone without automatically volunteering myself as the solution? Could I close the door without standing in the doorway giving a PowerPoint presentation about why I was allowed to leave?
This time, I needed a different kind of strength. The strength to close the cycle.
My Name Is Not a Favor
When I stepped away, I learned another lesson. Campaign finance isn’t based on friendship, loyalty, or good intentions. It’s based on records. And my name was attached to those records. So I worked from what I could substantiate. Where my knowledge stopped, I stopped.
I became comfortable saying: I don’t know, and I cannot honestly confirm what I cannot verify. That isn’t incompetence. That’s integrity. The experience permanently changed how I think about attaching my name to anything. My signature isn’t community service. If my name carries responsibility, I need access. If my signature carries consequences, I need information. If I’m expected to provide accountability, I need corresponding authority. My name is not a favor.
For the Person Who Is Always “The Strong One”
Maybe you know this story too. You agreed to one thing and somehow became responsible for everything.
You’re the person everybody calls because: She’ll figure it out. And you do. You organize. You remember. You fix. You stabilize. You carry. You do it so smoothly that people eventually stop noticing the weight. Then something falls.
And instead of someone asking: Why was she carrying all of this? They ask: How did she drop the ball?
Maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the real question is: Why did I believe all of this was mine to carry?
Being strong can become an identity. Being needed can feel like validation. And being the person who saves the day can become so familiar that you don’t realize you’re volunteering for your own exhaustion. That was mine to confront.
Before You Volunteer
If you are ever asked to volunteer for a campaign, board, nonprofit, community organization, or anything that will attach your name, reputation, time, or signature to someone else’s vision, ask questions before you say yes.
What exactly am I responsible for? What am I not responsible for? What authority and access come with my responsibility? Who else is actually doing the work? How is disagreement handled?
And one question I wish more volunteers asked: What is the process for leaving?
Don’t be so inspired by the mission that you neglect to examine the infrastructure. And once you’re inside, pay attention. Pay attention to how people communicate when they’re disappointed. Pay attention to whether responsibilities have names attached to them or whether they simply migrate toward whoever is competent enough to catch them. Pay attention to who comes. And pay very close attention to who stays.
Because volunteering means offering your service. It does not mean surrendering your boundaries. Your time is not automatically available because you offered some of it. Your competence is not permission to continuously increase your responsibilities. Your signature is not a favor. And believing deeply in someone’s mission does not require attaching your name to the way they execute it.
Ask the questions.
Read the room.
Watch the patterns.
And remember: You are allowed to believe in the mission and still decide that the way the mission is being carried out is not something you are willing to carry.
Freedom
On August 4th, the letter arrived. Approved. And there was that song again in my mind. Freedom.
Suddenly, the letter wasn’t paperwork. It was release.
Not revenge. Not vindication.
Not I told you so. Release.
Because I wasn’t only being released from a campaign position. I was releasing a pattern.
The woman who automatically says: I’ll handle it. The woman who catches every ball because she knows she can. The woman who can be exhausted and still look completely composed. The woman who has sometimes confused being needed with being valued. I spent years becoming the woman who could hold a thousand balls. I thought that was the gift. Now I understand the gift is knowing which ones are mine.
March 29, I said enough. April 2, I stopped participating. August 4, the paperwork finally caught up. But the real freedom wasn’t written in that letter. The real freedom was that when the familiar pattern returned, I chose differently.
I didn’t pick everything back up. I didn’t stay simply because I knew I could endure it. I learned that closure didn’t require me to publicly litigate every experience. And I didn’t need everybody to understand my decision before permitting myself to make it. Sometimes leaving isn’t the statement. What becomes visible after you stop compensating is.
Some balls aren’t mine to catch. Some systems aren’t mine to hold together. Some outcomes aren’t worth compromising myself to achieve. And some cycles aren’t mine to repeat.
I volunteered to wear one hat. I found myself wearing a thousand. But when I finally put them down, I didn’t lose myself. I got myself back.
And somewhere in the background of my mind, that song was still playing.
Freedom.
