When I tell people the shape of my career, they wait for the reveal: which part did I play? Victim, swept along by circumstances beyond my control? Hero, the insider who saw through it and walked away? Whistleblower, ready to name names? None of the three fits, and I have stopped trying to make one of them fit.
For twenty years I sold, consulted, traded. Ten years as a marketing consultant, then ten years running an import and export firm. After that I advised companies expanding from the US to Europe on marketing, sales and legal. Different desks, same pattern underneath: I made money from it, I watched growth work, and later I watched it tip over while I stood in the middle of it myself.
The victim role would be the easiest to reach for. Something pulled me in, I did not know better at the time, others bear the responsibility. It would also be untrue.
The hero role is nearly as comfortable, and worse, because it flatters more than the victim role does. In that version I saw through the business before anyone else did, walked away and now confess. That is not what happened.
The whistleblower role is furthest from my reach, for a plainer reason. Before I can go to a journalist and name someone else, I have to settle my own account first.
What actually happened
What actually happened does not sort into any of the three. I profited from something and I watched it at the same time, perpetrator and witness in one person, and the two do not come apart cleanly.
The business itself depended on a placebo effect, already well documented by then. Customers bought the promise anyway, and I stood between them and the promise and made money from it. I think it is ordinary, in more professions than most people assume.
It still did something to me. Before some appointments I felt an unease that I pushed down for years, until I could not anymore. Getting honest with myself was harder than the discomfort, and it had to happen before anything could heal.
What interests me now is the road to telling it exactly as it was, without excuses, without a flattering edit.
Other insiders who speak up later tend to arrive with a cleaned-up version of events: the day it all became clear. I have no such day to offer. What I had was a slow, unremarkable process. At some point I heard myself saying the promises and realised I no longer believed my own words.
No cudgel, no clean break
I have left the moral cudgel where it is, because it would land on me as hard as on anyone else. I am not here to point at somebody. I know what it is to stand in the middle of it, and I think most people in the same position would have done the same thing. What explains it is that, in the moment, it simply felt normal.
In telling it, I am trying to say only what actually happened, which is harder than it sounds once you are used to telling yourself your own version of events. Discomfort is no longer a good enough reason to stop, not when the alternative is leaving out how it went and what it cost the customers who trusted me.
Cleaner would have meant switching sides, which is its own role, no less comfortable than the other three. What changed is narrower than that: I can now see, past the grey areas, where the hard line runs between what I did and what I told myself I was doing.
Roles are comfortable because they hand you a place to stand: victim, perpetrator, hero, each with a stage of its own. Someone who says he was perpetrator and witness at once gives people no category to work with. They cannot decide whether to like him. They wonder if he is trustworthy or just another strange case.
Reality does not sort into categories or roles. It is messy and contradictory, and I no longer think that is a flaw in the account.
I am not sparing myself and I am not condemning myself, both of which would be too easy and too little thought through. Telling it this way risks that nobody wants to buy my version of events. The other risk, telling a story I would not believe myself, matters more to me. I made money from it while I knew exactly what I was doing, and I do not regret having looked closely at what that did to the people across the table, and at what it did to me.