I Was Perpetrator and Witness

When you tell the story of your career, people want to know who you are in that story. Are you the victim? Are you the hero? Are you the bad guy who has now seen the light?

I am none of those.

I was part of a machinery. I wasn’t a large cog in it, but one of the small ones that helped keep the whole clockwork running. I earned from it, watched how growth works, and had to watch as well when it tips over. Not as an outsider, but from the middle of it.

The victim role is the easiest. I was pulled in because I didn’t know any better and everyone else was to blame. That narrative always reads well, because you come out looking good and everyone understands it.

But it isn’t true.

The hero role would also be easy. I saw through the truth and stepped out. I’m coming clean now and telling how it really was, so others can learn from it and admire me. That story reads great too. And it has the advantage that I come out looking even better. Not just a victim, also brave.

That narrative isn’t true either, though.

There are whistleblowers who go to the media, spill it, name it and point fingers at others: look what they did. That’s what I’m least able to do. I can’t settle scores with others, because the story isn’t enough for that. I have to settle the score with myself first.

What is truth?

The fact is, it is less comfortable than any of the options mentioned. I simultaneously profited and watched, a perpetrator and a witness in one person, without it being possible to cleanly separate the two.

The scientists say no, the customers say yes and I stand in that dissonance in between, earning money from it. This constellation isn’t particularly tragic. As far as I can tell, it’s everyday life, and that in more professions and situations than we maybe see. But it did something to me. The dissonance left traces behind. In part open wounds that don’t want to heal. It wasn’t the pain, it was the awareness that wounds only turn into scars when you are honest with yourself and take that as the precondition for healing.

I then found myself in a very unusual situation. It wasn’t about the struggle to work through the experience, but about the path to being ready to tell everything the way it really was. No excuses, no whitewashing, no adjusted version that sounds better than reality. I’ve watched many insiders who spoke later and told a cleaned-up version, one in which they woke up at some point, in which there was a turning point, a moment of clarity after which everything was different.

For me there was no such moment. It was a process. It was creeping and slow. Unspectacular. Not the lightning that struck, but more like a fog that lifted over the years, piece by piece.

I also recognised that it makes no sense to swing the moral club, because it would hit me just as hard. I didn’t step on a stage to raise the pointed finger: this is not how one should act. Because I know what it’s like to stand in the middle of it, and I know that most people in the same situation would have done the same thing. Not out of malice, but because it is normality in that moment.

When I tell the story, I try to commit to the truth. That isn’t easy when you’re used to telling yourself the versioned story too. I learned that an uncomfortable feeling must no longer stop me from really telling how it worked and what the price was that I paid.

I haven’t become purer through this. But more honest. That is for me the decisive difference. Purer means: I switched sides. That would again be a role. More honest means: I now see where the hard boundaries run beyond all the grey zones, between what I did and what I told myself.

The comfortable thing about roles is that they assign you a place: victims sit on one side, perpetrators belong on the other. As a hero you land on stage.

When you say I was both perpetrator and victim at the same time or at different times, the category is missing for people. They can’t judge whether they should like you or not. They ask themselves whether you are trustworthy or just another one of those weirdos.

Here is the point: reality doesn’t fit into categories, nor does it fit into roles. It’s characterised by being messy, contradictory and uncomfortable.

If I were to go easy on myself, the backpack wouldn’t get lighter. But I also don’t accuse myself. Both would be too easy and unreflective for me. I realised that I risk not being able to sell my version. But the second risk, of telling a story I wouldn’t believe myself, is incomparably higher. So for me there is one version: yes, I earned from it. Yes, I knew what I was doing. No, I don’t regret looking at what it does to us. And to me.