This episode talks about mental health, if this is a sensitive subject for you, feel free to skip.

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Previously, I shared that with the help of doctors, stable work and income as well as family and friends, I was able to function almost properly. I felt that stability had to be extracted by raw will power. But if you zoomed in and looked with a high enough resolution you could see oscillations. From darkness to light. From depression to happiness. At this point in my life, I had been followed by doctors and therapists for at least six years. They had come to a verdict, an explanation if you will, for these oscillations. I had a sickness. It described most of the symptoms. The medicine seemed to work. This was their diagnostic. I would learn several years later that it was not fully accurate, but at the time it gave me a sliver of understanding. Even though I did not like it, I did not like the label, it still brought a sense of comfort with it. What I was living was absurd but, there was an explanation to it.
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Around that time at work, an email from Scaleway’s parent company, Iliad, arrived in our inbox. The company was actively encouraging people that had a disability to communicate it to the human resource team. The French state had a quota, for a certain size companies, to hire a percentage of people with disabilities. This was well meaning, it made it easier for people that had been recognized disabled by the French state to have a stable job and work accommodations.
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I decided to meet with the head of HR to explain. She listened patiently and explained to me the process and steps. To be recognized by the government as disabled, I needed a letter from my psychiatrist and my family doctor had to submit a case.

I remember the discussion with both. They actively discouraged me from doing it. I was stable, I did not currently need work environment adjustments, I was not at risk of losing my job. To that I replied that it was not the case at the moment but it could change. The final argument, to which I had no answer, was, supposed I did it. Supposed I get all the paperwork done. Everything is fine. What if, in ten years, the company is bought out, what if management changes, what if the law changes, what happens then? As soon as I go forward with this, I will forever have a label. It might impact my career prospects, my promotions prospects, I had no arguments to oppose that. Could I trust both the company and the government for 10 or 20 years? If I could trust them, yes they would do it, otherwise they told me it was not worth it. This closed the discussion for me. I don’t mean to say that those measures are a bad thing, but for me, personally, it did not make sense. Since I did not need workplace accommodations, I declined to do the administrative file.

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I did not do the procedure, but I elected to do another thing. Something that, up to now, only very few people know the true meaning of. My mood was alternating between good and bad. This was never going to end. I was going to carry that for the rest of my life. So I had that inscribed in my right arm as a tattoo.

I contacted an artist that I had been following for some time and explained what I wanted. A yin-yang to represent the delicate balance and an ouroboro snake to represent the endless repetition. It was inked in three hours a few months later. It was a way to hide some things and show an encoded version of myself. When people asked what I meant, I would say something generic. I was afraid to explain the true meaning because of the stigma associated with it.

It was a way to accept myself. To accept the good and the bad. Accept it and continue marching on. I was accepting myself for the flaws and the strengths. That was made possible by the work environment, by the accomplishments, by the medical system, by the family and friends.

As I continued the work, I built abstractions and tried to maintain them. However sometimes, those are pierced through by process far away down or up in the chain.

If you have missed it, you can read the previous episode here​

To pair with :

• The way I am - Eminem
• The trial by Franz Kafka