The single most frustrating part of the closet is that it makes your original trauma dishonesty.

You construct a veil of dishonesty to protect yourself and so dishonesty becomes the mode of your existence.

When I finally shed the closet myself, which took almost 20 years of dedicated effort, I found myself almost incapable of lying at all. I don’t like it. Lying out of social pressure is the root cause of almost every traumatic moment of my life.

But looking for a job is an exercise in creative dishonesty.

Asking me to lie to get a job is like asking an alcoholic to do a shot before being hired.

I’m not supposed to tell you I was an addict, but what you should be most worried about is the people you don’t think are doing drugs at all, not the ones telling you about their struggles with addiction in the past.

I’m not supposed to tell you I had a mental health crisis three years ago, but what you should be worried about are your employees that have never set foot in a therapist’s office because they think they’re perfectly sane.

I’m not supposed to tell you I have struggled financially my entire life, but that’s what happens when you’re born poor-adjacent in one of the poorest states in the country before being kicked into adult life already straddled with student-loan debt despite “full-ride” scholarships.

Not telling you these things is difficult for me. Because they happened to me in the first place largely because I couldn’t tell you I loved men when I was a child. A lot of people would prefer I not tell you that now.

I don’t want to hide my past. I learned more from the gay life, drugs, and mental health crisis than from 30 years of education across math, language, philosophy and science. You want me because of those parts, not in spite of them. Let me tell you that honestly.

Honesty is uncomfortable.

But dishonesty is inefficient and inefficiency is bad for business.