You Just Don't Know

Today is World Mental Health Day and you just don’t know.

You don’t know what those around you are living with.

You don’t know what is really easy or hard for your colleagues, friends, and family. You only know what they choose to show you, or are unable to hide from you.

You can guess. You will often be very wrong.

This is a lesson that many men, myself included, have been trying to learn over the last years since the MeToo movement largely only gave consequences to those who spoke up.

This is a lesson that many white people, myself included, have been trying to learn over the last years since millions rose up in protest of George Floyd’s public murder and the still ongoing state-sanctioned racist terrorism in every place police are allowed exist. And again those protests have largely only given consequences to those who spoke up.

This is a lesson that many temporarily able and healthy people, myself included, have been trying to learn over the last years of shameless administrative violence and extractive abandonment by our political and business leaders in the face of an ongoing awful pandemic. And again beyond those maimed and killed by these policies, largely the only consequences come to those who visibly make tiny efforts to protect themselves and those around them, and who ask others to do the same.

We do not know who is sick around us, how sick they are, what impacts their sicknesses both physical and mental are having on their lives inside and outside work, how those impacts change day to day without warning.

We don’t know, and in many cases we don’t want to know.

We don’t want to know so much that we make sure those who made us aware are silenced and punished, and if possible made afraid enough in advance that they never build up the courage to speak out.

Like this we can point to all the people who never told us anything and say “See? It doesn’t exist.”

Don’t worry that there are story after story begging to be heard, available everywhere if we are willing to go looking for them. That’s other people, it’s not happening to anyone I know. It’s not going to affect me. No need to think about the personal bubbles of delusion we’ve built for ourselves.

And this is exactly why many people decide to take the consequences of speaking about their vulnerabilities, despite the near certainty that in one way or another it will be held against them - some people do listen. Eventually.

Often the people speaking now were the same people who weren’t listening five minutes ago - and as frustrating as that surely is for those who have been alone with the problem for so long, this is exactly how snowballs start gathering speed and give at least some hope of some parts of some problems being improved.

I am very aware that publishing this is likely to do more to harm my career and relationships, and so my and my family’s ability to remain housed and fed, than any temporary unnecessary sympathy it might gather.

We live in a society that is ableist and eugenicist to the core - it is a rare person who, even if they want to, can completely overcome that ableist grooming and remove every drop of the eugenicist poison from every corner of their conscious and unconscious thinking.

Even if people try to deliberately overcome the stigmas they are still being taught, disclosing sickness and weakness will with near certainty result in everything you do after that point, and retroactively many things you did before, being stained with less kind interpretations.

Many people are not so well intentioned. In particularly backwards countries, disclosure of physical and mental health issues results almost mechanically in direct financial and administrative punishments in the form of raised premiums, costs, and mandatory self-reported surveillance.

I know that my seniority and goodwill from decades of demonstrated competence and reliability won’t ever protect me from the assumptions that come from others knowing all the work I do and have ever done is being done by someone who has been depressed every day since they were a young child, someone who has lived with persistent depressive disorder every day they can remember.

I happen to be very good at hiding and disguising this reality, as many people with this kind of thing are. It’s obvious to anyone awake that constant positivity is a harshly enforced requirement for any kind of success in this world, so of course we hide where it hurts if we can.

Hiding and disguising, sometimes known as masking, are also very common in autistic people trying to cope with a world that is deeply hostile to them. Hiding and disguising are also one of the stereotypical defenses to childhood abuse.

I’ve been practicing hiding, hyper-vigilance, and showing only what I think is safe to show since before I can remember. I do this particularly around those with power over me, which with enough imagination and understanding of how connected everything and everyone is, can extend to the whole world.

It shouldn’t be surprising that you didn’t know this about me until I decided to disclose it. It shouldn’t be a surprise that you don’t know that what I see as simple facts and events from my childhood shock most people, even professionals. I don’t talk about it because I know how people react. It shouldn’t be a surprise that you don’t know that I personally know and witnessed people experience worse than me.

I have very few memories from before the age of around seventeen, having spent most of my home and school life in a semi-permanent state of disassociation. The few memories I have are almost universally not fun memories.

One of my earliest memories, from sometime around age five or six, was being in bed crying silently, silently because I knew what would happen if I was heard, deciding whether I dared to sneak downstairs to the phone and try to call the NSPCC Childline number that I’d somehow seen and hoped I had memorized, being also afraid it would be found if I wrote it down.

In the end, I was too scared to try - afraid I would be caught, afraid I misremembered the number, afraid nobody would do anything and still the nearby adults would find out, afraid even if people came any foster home would be even worse.

You have maybe been one of those who hear about people’s lives and disbelievingly ask “why did they stay?” or “why didn’t they fight back?”. None of my fears were even slightly unjustified, and I still to this day do not know whether going downstairs was the right choice or not. Often there are no good options, just multiple bad choices to be made completely alone.

The NSPCC has attempted to categorize child abuse into 13 types . I personally experienced 7 of them at home, 4 of them at school, and directly or indirectly witnessed 10 of them happening to others around me at home.

Aside: and now you know why one of the only things I stuck my head out to ask for was to go to school, and later to change school, despite how awful it was. Do the maths.

For all the reasons above, it is next to impossible to accurately count how many children are abused by those close to them, but the NSPCC estimates just for the one category of neglect, around 10% of children in the UK have had to live through it. This is not a rare thing, you surely know other people than me who have been through it.

While the physical violence I received was the most spectacular and shocking to most people who witnessed it or hear about it, it was the neglect that has left me broken. Understanding to your core and accepting the reality as tiny human that you are unwanted, uncared for, unloved, unprotected, and that nobody was ever coming is not something you recover from.

Aside: the next time you hear someone talking about parental rights to justify their awful behaviours and policies, please remember that there is no such thing. At least in a just world, parents have responsibilities, it is children who need rights.

The result of all this is that I’ve never been happy a day in my life. I literally don’t understand what being happy would look like - I believe it exists, but I have simply no idea how that would feel. I’m very good at distracting myself for even long moments - one of the advantages of ADHD hyper-focus when it’s working for me and not against me. I enjoy and like certain things. I can laugh and smile and joke, both as a mask and genuinely. But I can assure you that is not happiness, or if it is, ??Iiiiii want my money back??.

And yet, any who have worked with me can see that I am functional. In the right domain, I can sometimes be absurdly functional. In fact the exact combination of my full acceptance that this hell we live in is real and my constant disgust at the small and large administrative violences and neglects in all of our societies, organizations, products, and services, and my determination to not put up with any of it, combined with my precise masking for each situation, is often exactly what makes me uniquely functional at work.

This acceptance, disgust, and determination is the real beating heart of my Embarrassment-Driven Product Management ?, even if I usually dress it up (ie mask it) in much more positive and corporately acceptable words and facial expressions.

That does not mean I’m fine. I’m not, I never have been, and I maybe never will be. And that’s okay. Well not exactly okay, but it is what it is.

That does not mean it made me stronger. I’m not stronger for my childhood - everything is constantly harder because of it, I have been in and out of burnout month to month since I was at school. The damage is permanent.

The idea that trauma makes people stronger, more creative, or anything else positive is a dangerous ludicrous myth that amongst many other sins completely leaves out those who simple don’t survive at all.

Similar to grief, people at best find ways to live on with it as a constant companion, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground. Some days are worse, some days are better, and you hope over time you are on average most days better at dealing with it. But that doesn’t mean it disappears, even if people are highly discouraged to continue mentioning it past a certain time.

We just don’t know. I think that fact should change how we behave towards each other. And yes, that includes changing how we consider changes to our products and organizations.

We just don’t know. What will you do with that fact?

"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. [..] You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it." - The Talmud, Pirkei Avos (Ethics/Chapters of the Fathers) 2:16