I sat directly opposite the person accusing me of what I had hoped to continue concealing, in an open office, white noise and chatter drifting in and out of my focus making it hard to speculating his next move. From where I sat his balding head was poised like a permanent, colourless sunset above his monitor.
Maybe he was blushing, or sweat was falling down his forehead. I couldn’t know for sure, because he didn’t get up from his chair for the entire afternoon. In that moment, I felt the weight of it all. Of the invisible difference I had, of my mask slipping away together with my glossy charade. Playing the part was all I had, until in one moment, it wasn’t.
Up until this point – around two years after finding out and roughly one and a half years into working with this very same manager – I felt like a riddle waiting to be solved. The answer was right there. I wasn’t an open book from the outside, but mild intrigue would have done it. No one asked me, so no one knew.
I had become a conundrum.
Once you box something up and put it away unmarked, you start to forget about it yourself. Only so much contortion was manageable at any one time - juggling being a young 20-something dealing with the typical things a 20-something does, in a new shiny professional job at a shiny global company – ‘with a reputation to uphold’ - and trying endlessly to keep my head afloat was proving too much.
This became apparent to me when I flew a little too close to the sun. By ‘flew’ I mean stuttered, and by ‘sun’, I mean to the people who managed me. I couldn’t mask anymore. Not that I realised it before I joked about my dyslexia. It only became apparent when I flew straight past the sun, heading right towards imposter syndrome and an already crumbling sense of self.
The guilt snaked up on me when the slow and creeping censorship of my professional existence started forming because of that moment with my manager. How did this come to be? People start to distance themselves the second you’re open about your vulnerabilities, like that’s all you’re reduced to – Is this my life now? I would wonder.
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