ava's blog

between destigmatization and unprofessionalism

A few days ago, my wife told me about something happening in the art community, specifically the webcomic community.

The full allegations can be read here, but in short:

Hiveworks used to provide web hosting, site design, advertising support, and crowdfunding services for indie webcomic creators. It soon failed to deliver on the promised services and demonstrated a pattern of unprofessional conduct, poor communication, incompetence, and disrespect, leading to debt and a breakdown in professional relationships. The accusations come from around 100 creators that have worked with Hiveworks.

I don't wanna comment on the whole situation itself, as I have no skin in the game or knowledge of anyone involved (aside from my wife loving the Crow Time web comic and owning a Crow plushie), but some things in the text caught my eye.

"Isa would express feeling overworked while simultaneously taking on new projects, and despite dealing with health issues, would continue to pile things onto her own plate."

" In Isa’s case, openness about her health struggles often felt tailored to excuse the lack of support creators received and induce guilt to anyone wanting answers."

This reminded me of another occasion where I've seen openness about health struggles criticized, namely the Cohost shutdown. There were at least a handful of post-mortems published, and even before that, threads on forums and discussions on servers about the management of the site. In them, the way the developers of Cohost occasionally shared (mental) health struggles as to why development of certain features took longer than anticipated was criticized, saying it was unprofessional, guilt-tripping, and an excuse.

"The staff will routinely talk about how they didn't get features shipped because they were sick, depressed, have ADHD, whatever."

As a chronically ill person that shares quite a lot about her health online, stuff like this makes me second-guess myself, wondering where the line is between destigmatizing health struggles and creating a safe environment, and oversharing leading to a toxic environment.

Have I crossed it? Is this right and we are often weaponizing our conditions, or is there ableism involved, retroactively using someone's openness about their struggles as ammo?

I brought this up to my wife to discuss. How can chronically ill people be honest about their state without making people uncomfortable or being seen as unprofessional? We have called upon normalizing discussing mental health all these years, but do we still punish those that actually do?

The issue that I see is that many simple facts, or even the existence of sick people, can cause some difficult emotions in others, which is unpleasant and "unprofessional". It's also easy to point to an honest admission of weakness as the obvious reason for a project's failure, which can detract from the actual causes.

In the thread from 2023 I linked above, I defended the decisions of the Cohost staff to share their experience more openly.

"I am tired of corporate professionalism. I am tired of saving face. I am tired of everyone pretending they are fine, and like that criticism or even customer hate mail didn't hurt, or wasn't disappointing.
I'm tired of people pretending they aren't chronically ill, disabled, mentally ill, still grieving a death, in period pain and other stuff. It's messed up for me that cashiers, waiters, and all kinds of people in the daily life can't be open and honest about what day they're having when it is relevant because it would be unprofessional towards me as a customer.
I am tired of having to see them as replaceable, characterless, public-safe stand-ins for the brand that always function!

I am tired of having to participate in a culture that does this and engage in playpretend. I hate having to act as if I am productive 100% of the time when I have a week or two where I can't focus much at all. [...]

I want to interact with humans, and I want to engage with things made by humans. And humans are like that.
[...] And the good part is, when many people around you do this, you start feeling like less of a loser for not being productive that day, that week, that month; because the people around you that you admire for all their projects have this too. The public persona who never fails and never gets upset harms us all, because that's who we compare ourselves to and we always fall short.[...]"

And I still feel similarly.

Talking with my wife, she pointed to a helpful example of something she had experienced a couple times in the past:

A person would offer goods (or services) online, and all is well for a while. Suddenly, orders take longer to be fulfilled. Customers wait longer for replies. They message the creator and get the reply "Sorry, the past few weeks have been awful, I've dealt with a huge bout of depression, but I will get back to it soon."
But things get delayed even more, while they still seem to be accepting more projects. After repeated reminders by customers and excuses made because of illness, the person just vanishes completely from delivering on their promises, but without ever addressing it.

The issue is the poor communication, not taking responsibility, and not adjusting their workload; opening up about depression is just a small part.

A better approach would be:

In these scenarios, people often feel that the illness or specific circumstances are mentioned to create more leniency and pity, and I can't blame them; I guess sometimes, this happens. That's why we should be cautious when exactly we mention it. Being open about illness doesn't mean you have to bring it up at any chance or cost.

Most of the time, the customer (or user) won't need to know why exactly something didn't happen; just that someone cares, that it is known, that the issue is being worked on, and maybe an estimate when they can expect this to be resolved or get their service/item. That means far more to the customer than having specifics.

I know how it is to feel a compulsion to over-explain; this happens a lot to people who grew up in toxic or abusive households and were accused of lying or never believed. We were taught that we need to be upfront with any sort of information we have that could make it seem more legit and believable. If our first reasoning wasn't convincing, we weren't believed at all, and any information supplied during additional questioning was seen as made up on the spot.

That mindset led me to call in sick in 2019 as a trainee, writing in the e-mail "Sorry, I have to miss work today. I just puked into the tram on the way to the office.".

No one asked, no one needed to know this. No one at my work shares any illness details in the e-mails to notify a sick day, and I know this now. But I had only been there for a year, and as a trainee, you were treated as lazy by default and searching for any excuses not to show up, so I felt like I was at a disadvantage and had to prove my reason for missing work was 'real'. I was immediately transported back into over-explainer-mode.
Owing someone something can make you do that. We want people to know that we do not do this voluntarily, out of malice, out of greed or laziness, and that we have legitimate reasons.

It's good to internalize that in most cases of explaining a delay, a worse performance, forgetfulness or more, people don't need or want specifics, or deserve to know them. You can be open about your health as well, but only together with the bullet point behaviors above, or within other contexts that aren't about a lackluster performance.

I might talk about my headache to a coworker, but not in the context of deadlines or the status of a project.

I may ask for help on completing some work because I feel very sick that day, but I don't say that; I just ask for help, and receive it. The exact reason why I struggle is not necessary to justify it or to help create a culture where asking for help or admitting mistakes is safe.

I might call in sick because of a disease flare-up and don't mention it in the e-mail, but talk about it a week later during lunch after having already returned to work.

I can let people know about diagnoses casually as it comes up in normal conversation, not as justification for my behavior.

I could write a blog post about a specific challenge I had due to my chronic illness after it has already resolved, not dumping it in an e-mail or direct message to a person that wants something from me. I might share openly about my health on this blog, but completely removed from any demands placed on me.

Talking all this through with my wife really solidified this for me, and I think I have a solid grasp now where the line is and how not to cross it.

Of course, there will always be some people - often from older generations - who see any openness about struggles in mental or physical health as something private that should be kept to oneself at all costs, and will claim it as unprofessional no matter the context. I will accept that. I know that this sort of thinking is dying out, and that we can create a culture where we are open about illness without (accidentally) guilt-tripping or risking our professional identity.

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#2026 #health