Hey gang!

So it has been a minute! I alluded to my plan to venture off into the woods in prior posts but didn't go into too much detail. Any who, I'm back but not on my own accord.

The reason I ask this question is because it just happened to me. I've struggled with depression and anxiety for going on 15 years, I've talked to a lot of people about it, gotten help, and received a lot of support over the years. I have never had it blow back in my face like it just did. Super long story kind of short:

• I want to offer some context here, that not more than a week prior, my organization had a "getting vulnerable" meeting whereby we were asked (but not required) to share some information about ourselves with our crews. Crews worked and lived together in remote back country settings for months at a time, to be honest it went pretty well. I did not open up too much at the time as I had just met everybody, but eventually I got more comfortable.
• I told the wrong person at my work, my direct supervisor (I was in no danger at any point during my employment, this information was given in a contextual fashion. Because we work so closely together for weeks at a time and also live together, these types of things tend to come out.)
• They told the wrong people (management).
• I was talked to for 5 hours in a closed door meeting with the top brass of the organization (read: interrogated and asked to give a comprehensive psychological background, even though I had already given them a topical briefing during the hiring process.)
• I was pulled out of the field for liability reasons (I openly objected to this, saying that said field was best for my mental health.)
• I was placed on an "in-town" crew that I did not want to join (I openly objected to this as well.)
• I tried to exist on the new crew, but found it immediately and chronically untenable. My new coworkers were OK people, but the stark contrast in personalities between my old and new crew was jarring. Given our line and nature of work, this is super important and there's no way top brass didn't know about this. I voiced this and once again requested to be placed back in the back country at a base camp, I was ignored.
• My mental health began to catch up to me. I did not like my position in life or at work, having to live in the city which is something I came out here to entirely avoid was crushing any and all morale I tried to work up.
• The writing was on the wall. I didn't like it there anymore, and my employer didn't seem to care (despite their claims) about where I was within the organization.
• I voluntarily resigned due to mental health reasons rather than just walk out. The urge to entirely burn this bridge and emphatically explain to them why what they did was so improper was incredibly strong, but I decided not to. This organization is a big name in our field and the field isn't all that big, they stated that I'd be welcome back, I'd sooner clean a peanut butter covered shag carpet with my tongue.

The general mood and sentiment during all of my conversations with staff members could be described as tense. The way in which I was treated during all of those meetings was as though I was a conglomeration of suicidal, homicidal and a direct threat to anybody near me. I could literally see their brains doing very careful dance numbers as they walked over what they thought were eggshells, when at no point was that the case in my view. Their actions, disguised as being motivated by empathy, came straight out of the Harvard Business School of Cover Your Ass. At one point they mentioned they had a psychologist on retainer that they were consulting. I have seen so many damn therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, shrinks and every other name in the book over 15 years. I have never met one that would ever make any absolute statements or suggest any concrete actions before even meeting a patient. Their inability to even empathize with what I had been going through was apparent. At no point did they seem to consider the human in the room, it was always "we appreciate what you bring", "you are a good resource to have", and the worst of all "we hear you, but..." Holy fuck the lingering but was bad. "I'm not racist, but...", dude sit the fuck down.

So that happened within a week or so. There's quite a few more details but I don't want to make the entire point of this post to rant (even though that's what it has turned into.) I am now jobless, homeless as housing was through my work, in an entirely new city to me and floating on savings. It's not too bad to be honest. This is not my first homeless (hobo, vagabond, rubber tramp) experience/adventure, I'm not financially comfortable (I'm on borrowed time) but I'm not broke and honestly I'm in a good place mentally. I've been camping in the woods and I've got everything I need to survive. I'm even super involved in a local activist group, if that's any testament to how comfortable I've become in my current position.

So, does this sound familiar to anybody here? Have you been discriminated against in this fashion? How'd you react? Cope? Where did you go from there? I'd like to hear from others to simply know I'm not alone in this bullshit. I've been in support groups for mental health, and other reasons, but I've never realized the need for this subset of people to seek support. It's been 10 days now and I'm honestly still in shock.

Feel free to get as vulnerable as you want, I won't tell your fucking inept boss.

I posted an article yesterday about name-blind hiring processes, and it got me thinking of discrimination slightly differently.

I actually don't feel that we run into outright racial discrimination as much nowadays. Instead it's more subtle. It's not about technical merit, but about cultural fit. Often times, distilling down to one skill - English (both spoken and written).

It brings up questions such as:

• Can a candidate communicate verbally for the job? (Technical, though sometimes this may be judge harder than for a native English speaker that isn't always clear)
• Do they "get" jokes and other subtleties? (Cultural fit)
• Do they have an accent? How heavy is it?

I believe this is for a couple reasons:

• Candidate just can't display enough charm or charisma during the hiring process
• Raise doubts about a candidate's education/upbringing. This in itself is discriminatory (though location is not a protected class), but some regions are though to train their students in more blunt force manners than skills in problem solving

What do you all think?

Well, there comes a time in every community's existence where someone gets an idea for discussion from another thread he wishes were better framed. So buckle in. This discussion is intended to sit at an uncomfortable cultural crossroads.

In the EU, gay spouses are now able to have the same freedom of movement rights as straight spouses. The Supreme Court in the United States ruled that a baker was treated unfairly by a Colorado regulatory commission when they tried to suss out if he discriminated against a gay couple who wanted to purchase a wedding cake.

In Brazil (you thought I was going to let this one be), courts have explicitly allowed conversion therapy to continue.

In Chechnya (a part of Russia that I always seem to struggle to spell), you could be hunted down and tortured or killed if you were gay, with people turning their own family members over to the local government. The local government, in absurdity, claimed after the purge that there were "no gays" in Chechnya, so there could have been no purge.

The point I'm trying to make here is that LGBT+ discrimination is an issue that should touch just about everywhere.

Before we get too deep, a point on terms. Discrimination, strictly speaking, is separating one thing from another. It is not necessarily a hostile act. If I say "you can drive only if your vision is good enough to read signs while you drive," that is discrimination on the basis of your ability to see, but most people aren't likely to say it's unreasonable discrimination (there is a rather obvious safety implication, for starters). Similarly, if you tell women to go to the bathroom in one space, and men to go to the bathroom in another space, that is discrimination based on gender. Is it reasonable discrimination? That might depend on if you're trans, and what state you're in.

This topic has to be more limited than this set up implies it will be. We won't be able to narrow things well enough to have a meaningful discussion otherwise. Today, we're just going to touch on the simple (ha!) matter of whether baking a wedding cake is art, whether refusing a wedding cake to a gay couple is discrimination, and what a government should be expected to do about it. So, the questions:

• Is making a custom wedding cake for a wedding "art"?
• Is refusing a custom wedding cake to a couple because it would be for a cause you do not support discrimination on the basis of that couple's identity?
• How should a just government resolve a dispute between a couple who feel unreasonably discriminated against and an artist who feels compelled to use speech for a cause they do not support?

And a bonus question:

• What role should a judicial branch have in advancing various groups' rights? Does relying on this less democratic method for securing rights open a movement up to counter-reaction or is the counter-reaction simply an inevitable consequence of a movement's success?