During one of the worst stretches of my life, I was leading a HubSpot migration — a full transformation, systems moving, data mapping, and a set of dashboards to build so leadership could finally see their business clearly.
Let me tell you what else was happening during those weeks.
I cried in my office with the door shut. More than once. A trigger would land — an email, a tone, an envelope — and send me somewhere years away, and I would sit in that office and shake and come back and keep mapping fields.
Both of those things are true. Same weeks. Same office. Same person.
The dashboards shipped. They worked. The migration landed.
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Sit with the irony for a second, because I’ve had to.
I was building visibility infrastructure. Dashboards — the literal instruments that let leadership see what’s actually happening instead of managing stories about it. And I built them while making absolutely certain that nobody could see what was actually happening ten feet from the conference room.
Visibility for the company. A mask for the builder. I was the best argument against my own hiding, and I couldn’t afford to notice.
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Here’s the false binary this section exists to break.
Business culture runs on an unspoken either/or: either you are struggling, or you are competent. Pick one. The two states are treated as mutually exclusive — which is why disclosure feels so dangerous. Say “PTSD” out loud and you can watch it happen in real time: someone starts checking your work for cracks it never had. The work didn’t change. The inspection did.
And the inspection is gendered, in case you were wondering. When I say PTSD, what most civilians hear is *hi, I’m a drama queen.* The diagnosis only arrives with full credibility when it’s carried by a man in uniform.
Here’s the twist, and it surprised me too: the male veterans are the understanding ones. Their reaction has never been doubt. It’s protectiveness — *oh my god, you don’t have to disclose something so private.*
That one stops me every time. *Private.* Why is it so private? I’m not handing anyone the what or the why — those are mine and they stay mine. I’m disclosing exactly one fact: that this is hard. Somewhere along the way we built a culture where *this shit is hard* qualifies as an intimate confession. That’s not privacy. That’s the contract, teaching even the kind people to guard the wrong door.
So people don’t disclose. Rationally. And the either/or survives another year, unfalsified, because everyone who could falsify it is hiding.
Let me falsify it.
Did I cry in my office? Yes. Did a trigger send me somewhere I didn’t choose to go, in the middle of a workday? Yes. Did the dashboards ship, on time, correct, to a standard I’d put my name on today? Yes.
The conditions and the competence were never in conflict. They coexisted. They coexist right now, in me, as I write this. What they were in conflict with was the *performance* — because pretending to be fine is expensive, and every dollar of that budget comes out of the same account the work draws on.
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And I need you to understand: I am not rare.
Your team, today, contains people delivering real work through conditions you know nothing about. The analyst with the panic disorder. The ops lead who dissociates in long meetings and has gotten very good at the thoughtful-nod recovery. The salesperson managing depression like a second quota.
You have been benefiting from the competence of people with mental health conditions for your entire career. The proof that we can deliver is sitting in your P&L, unattributed. The only thing you’ve never seen is the cost column — because the contract keeps it hidden, and the hiding is itself the biggest line on it.
The question was never whether people like me can do the work. We’ve been doing it the whole time.
The question is what it says about the building that we had to hide while doing it — and what we’d build if we didn’t.