The Long Shadow of Erasure: 5 Years After Workplace Trauma
It’s been five years since I experienced my own form of workplace trauma. Five years since the organization I founded, that I built from scratch, cast me out. The pain isn’t as sharp now. But the aftermath still lingers in ways I didn’t expect.
The organization goes on as if I never existed. The “origin story,” the one every organization tells with pride, has been erased from the website.
My name is gone. My history deleted.
Everyone I once worked alongside has moved on, another layer of erasure. The original crew who helped build the org with me disappeared from my life in the immediate aftermath. Women I considered friends. Now even after leaving the organization themselves, they still ignore me. As if nothing ever happened.
A few board members remain, people I personally put into power. They believed the smear campaign crafted by those who wanted to hijack what I built. Even a few advisors I appointed who understood exactly what happened to me stayed on, choosing affiliation over integrity.
They sit comfortably now, benefiting from the glow of an organization I created, while my role has been reduced to a faint memory at best.
For me, what happened is seared into my brain forever. For all of them, it’s an inconvenience better forgotten. The word betrayal only begins to describe the feeling.
That’s what a successful cover-up looks like. It doesn’t just bury the truth, it rewrites it. It replaces the founder with mystery, gives credit where it’s not due.
It’s easier to ignore the truth than to admit you are enabling the abuse. And the erasure becomes another kind of violence. It isolates the survivor all over again.
People often wonder why the trauma of workplace abuse lasts so long. It’s because the story doesn’t end with the firing, or the public statement, or the NDA.
It continues in the erasure that never ends; the deliberate rewriting of history that tells the world you never mattered. The sounds of silence are deafening.
You can heal from the immediate pain, but the loss of your story, that takes longer.
Five years later, I’m still recovering. The cover-up was a success in every visible way. But the truth lives in me, and in these words. Because erasure only works if you stay silent. And I’m never being silent.
What happened to me is why I do this work now: helping others name and understand what happened, see through the gaslighting, and reclaim the stories their employers tried to erase.