I haven't named the company nor indulged in excess in the way I expressed my views. What poses problem goes beyond the aftertaste the loaded and one-sided account of a conflict leaves in the mouth. There is something scandalous in what I said, because it tells a story of contagion, in which what's as stake is not the mere risk of hiring a walking red flag, but of losing your ability to assess risk and becoming one yourself. What could have possibly happened to a manager whose job is conditioned on his ability to hire back someone and who approaches the problem with "you better behave". He lost track of economical reality, passion took hold of him and made him blind to his own interests. Why ? Because we engaged in a symbolic exchange using taboo tokens. The danger doesn't lie on the individual level, and isn't rooted on whether or not we are opened to these topics, but depend on the fact that being taboo, these subjects are not codified enough in social norms to operate in a mechanical fashion. Imagine if someone were to thank you every time you'd do him a favor in a society which wouldn't have this norm. We do it automatically and do not give it a second thought. But in a context like this, it would ring like "I'll think about you", or "mucho gracias", "many graces". "Who is this weirdo ? Is he stalking me ? Is he high or part of some cult ?". It would work up people, they would get cognitively and emotionally involved, it would slowly turn into an obsession as they lose track of other values, in particular economical ones, up to the moment they say "why are you doing this to me after all I've done for you by opening up to your issues ?", completely blind to reality banging on the door.

We are not ready to discuss this kind of things. We are not equipped to deal with the kind of storms this can raise on the collective level and proactive openness on the individual level we're restricted to, no matter how hard we wish for a transcendance, is an enabler of these situations where no isolation of individual responsibility can pin-point the source of the issue. I mean I got along with everyone and the people I had the most temporary conflictual relationships at some point were also those I was closest too. In the beginning we all had good intentions. Nevertheless, double-bind propagated in the group like an epidemic, preventing us from having innocent relationships. Suddenly, invoices were issued, each party establishing accounts in different currencies.

In the end, from a cold-headed analysis of the situation, I still think I was the one that was behaving. If this was a story about my circle of friends, I'd be the asshole, placing economical matters in a central position, as if we were in a corporate setting. But it's my employer who behaved as if we were friends, and started neglecting economical considerations to its detriment.

In short, speaking of mental health made everybody unhealthy. In fact I'm not the one who overshared, my father did. I didn't show up for a couple days and blacked out communication-wise (because of a girl, a half-truth). The CEO phoned my dad who confided I was suffering from bipolar disorder since my teens which just isn't true from a clinical perspective (this is my sister's diagnostic in fact). Shortly after everybody was in the know. I could tell from their terrified eyes when they glanced at me when I came back. They were afraid I'd flip my shit. This is something we can't deal with. You can't just be designated as being a "little crazy". This expands to "a little [very-weird]". There is a perceptual threshold, including among health and sometimes even mental health professionals that makes people assume past a certain point you just flip your shit, that's your thing, an irreducible otherness that sleeps within you. Needless to say this has never happened to me (unlike my sister).

You can't just unveil taboos, you always end up exposing a mask. There is something very archaic to what happened to me, something attuned to the idea that naming illness is what propagates it: to deal with the mask, you have to wear one yourself (in the form of a secret slack channel for instance, even though as someone who used to belong to it told me, it was set up to find ways to help me). This idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Although I have only explained how my employer was contaminated by what ought to be called "panic" in light of its etymological and anthropological roots, I think you can easily picture how this kind of situation can make you crazy. And if I'm responsible in any way of letting myself get contaminated, this is by entertaining this very idea, that being designated as crazy was slowly turning a lie into reality. The epitome of madness, supreme injustice, that isn't that different of accusing someone of having cast a spell on you. Tough stuff that puts all of us back into the jungle.

To conclude, I'm not even out of this hellish loop, since I still have a gaping hole in my CV I can only mask. There is no way explaining the reason behind it like I'm doing here would diffuse or at least atone this red flag. Innocence is impossible, I have to maintain the mask in order for it to not cause explosive contagion.

To those worrying this I'm posting under my real name: I'm not. And I was able to work as much for so long because I was enjoying it. This wasn't that different than alpinism.