This sounds like a terribly traumatic experience. I’m so sorry you went through this, and I hope you are in a better place and feel safer now.
Your self-worth is so, so much more than how well you can navigate what sounds like a manipulative, controlling, and abusive work environment.
spent months trying to figure out how to empathize with Kat and Emerson, how they’re able to do what they’ve done, to Alice, to others they claimed to care a lot about. How they can give so much love and support with one hand and say things that even if I’d try to model “what’s the worst possible thing someone could say”, I’d be surprised how far off my predictions would be.
It sounds like despite all of this, you’ve tried to be charitable to people who have treated you unfairly and poorly—while this speaks to your compassion, I know this line of thought can often lead to things that feel like you are gaslighting yourself, and I hope this isn’t something that has caused you too much distress.
I also hope that Effective Altruism as a community becomes a safer space for people who join it aspiring to do good, and I’m grateful for your courage in sharing your experiences, despite it (very reasonably!) feeling painful and unsafe for you.[1] All the best for whatever is next, and I hope you have access to enough support around you to help with recovering what you’ve lost.
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[Meta: I’m aware that there will likely be claims around the accuracy of these stories, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the potential difficulty of sharing experiences of this nature with a community that rates itself highly on truth-seeking, possibly acknowledging your own lived experience as “stories” accordingly; as well as the potential anguish it might be for these experiences to have been re-lived over the past year and possibly again in the near future, if/when these claims are dissected, questioned, and contested.]
That being said, your experience would be no less valid had you chosen not to share these. And even though I’m cautiously optimistic that the EA community will benefit from you sharing these experiences, your work here is supererogatory, and improving Nonlinear’s practices or the EA community’s safety is not your burden to bear alone. In a different world it would have been totally reasonable for you to not have shared this, if that was what you needed to do for your own wellbeing. I guess this comment is more for past Chloes or other people with similar experiences who may have struggled with these kinds of decisions than it is for Chloe today, but thought it was worth mentioning.
This sounds like a terribly traumatic experience. I’m so sorry you went through this, and I hope you are in a better place and feel safer now.
Your self-worth is so, so much more than how well you can navigate what sounds like a manipulative, controlling, and abusive work environment.
It sounds like despite all of this, you’ve tried to be charitable to people who have treated you unfairly and poorly—while this speaks to your compassion, I know this line of thought can often lead to things that feel like you are gaslighting yourself, and I hope this isn’t something that has caused you too much distress.
I also hope that Effective Altruism as a community becomes a safer space for people who join it aspiring to do good, and I’m grateful for your courage in sharing your experiences, despite it (very reasonably!) feeling painful and unsafe for you.[1] All the best for whatever is next, and I hope you have access to enough support around you to help with recovering what you’ve lost.
============
[Meta: I’m aware that there will likely be claims around the accuracy of these stories, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the potential difficulty of sharing experiences of this nature with a community that rates itself highly on truth-seeking, possibly acknowledging your own lived experience as “stories” accordingly; as well as the potential anguish it might be for these experiences to have been re-lived over the past year and possibly again in the near future, if/when these claims are dissected, questioned, and contested.]
That being said, your experience would be no less valid had you chosen not to share these. And even though I’m cautiously optimistic that the EA community will benefit from you sharing these experiences, your work here is supererogatory, and improving Nonlinear’s practices or the EA community’s safety is not your burden to bear alone. In a different world it would have been totally reasonable for you to not have shared this, if that was what you needed to do for your own wellbeing. I guess this comment is more for past Chloes or other people with similar experiences who may have struggled with these kinds of decisions than it is for Chloe today, but thought it was worth mentioning.