In a complete 180 from what やりたい放DIE！ has represented so far, I am writing about my life. My professional life, specifically. Though I want to try to convey useful things to whoever may be reading this, I am primarily writing this for myself, to get something out of my chest. You are about to read a long and confused mess because I am writing about a long and confused mess.
From October 2024 to February 2026 (albeit with some interruptions), I worked at the national hotline for the elderly and disabled suffering from abuse.
The premise of a call to our service is that you are the recipient or witness of abuse on someone disabled and/or aged 60+ who needs help in whatever form it may be available.
You are put on the line with us, people who are here to listen to you, and if you wish so, we gather information and forward it to the most competent entities (our "partners” as I will refer to them from now on) so that you receive the help you need.
Working there completely transformed me.
Something I noticed very quickly upon arriving is that our tasks were in the hands of a very small team. For the whole time I’ve been there we were no more than 10 to serve thousands. We answered as many as 13000 calls in 2025, a number that my superiors never failed to point out as “on the rise”.
Our hotline has a long history and I don't understand most of it, however my colleagues told me that we used to border on insignificance two years before I joined, but that we gained a lot of attention recently. And for the whole time I was here I did notice an increase in how many calls we answered. On our busiest days with a team of 8 people, we would answer as many as 150 calls.
What do we hear during these calls? All the horrors of the world. Disabled people with no means to fulfill their basic needs despite having all the money they need in their bank account, their access to funds being restricted by a third party. Moderately healthy people being admitted into retirement homes and seeing their body and mind crumble under the weight of abuse by dysfunctional staff that is more than often too few in numbers. Unwell people going back to live with their elder parents and showing them most of the many shades of psychological manipulation and physical torment. Parents in their elderly years, accepting to be under the care of their child who manipulates them into accepting living conditions equivalent to livestock as they steal their credit card and empty their bank accounts, with an -s if you will. Psychotic and neurotic people in a state of heightened distress pulling us into their warped world, believing that they are being attacked by their neighbors, or the government, or the psych ward's staff (sometimes they email us videos which we are contractually forced to watch. Have you ever seen a manic person’s eyes while they’re in the midst of an episode? It’s nothing you ever see in regular everyday life)
Elderly people abused by their partner for the majority of their life having the epiphany they wished they had before pledging an oath, yet wondering if deep down their pathos is justified.
Sometimes people tell you they're going to kill themselves and it's your responsibility to figure out if they're 20 minutes or weeks away from doing it and provide the appropriate response based on that.
All these scenarios I listed are “story frames” I have heard hundreds of times. There are many ways someone can abuse someone but not as many conditions that allow abuse to begin and persevere. We quickly catch onto these patterns, for better or for worse.
Whereas many calls are forgotten once the sun goes down, some stories stay with you and haunt you forever.
I remember an educator calling us about a young expatriate adult. He came to France with no family and mental health problems debilitating enough that he had to be housed at a clinic of sorts. The educator told me this 20 year old young man was left very “vulnerable” by his trauma. His friends started exploiting him after they realized that if you threatened him for money he would give it. His bike got stolen after he got beaten up on the streets in broad daylight, an incident that allegedly occurred more than once.
I hear all this and thorns lodge themselves in my heart. The keyboard keys become heavier. Hellfire started welling up in me. As part of our job, we are required to write down addresses. I wanted to get up and find this young man and hug him, because I don't even know if he even gets that.
But I did not board the train and meet this young man, of course I never do more than what I am legally required to do, which is taking notes and forwarding them to those who can and are designated to step in and help.
The people who have the power and means to do anything for the victims are our “partners”. They can be associative entities or governmental entities depending on areas.
Once our calls are finished, everything is in their hands. The web interface we used allowed us to keep up with people’s situations and see what our partners did. And they may or may not do something. If they do something there is no guarantee that it can solve the problem. We usually do not get to hear about how situations evolve unless we are called back by the people who called us or we bother checking. When we are called back it's often by someone expressing distress and confusion about the fact that we told them we will do such and such and such and such and yet a month after the fact they are being given the cold shoulder.
Many times I have heard such people. And I have nothing to say to them, because there is often no explanation, because I know as much as they do. But I must tell them something, so I tell them I'll “email our partners to remind them that you are waiting, and that is the utmost I can do for you sir or madam”, a template sentence I have had the displeasure of saying hundreds of times. And then they tell me my colleague already said that a week ago. And I have nothing to say to them still, because of course we did, so I clutch the phone and gaze over to my colleagues, who are usually more emotional over the phone than I am, and I wonder if they think what I think in those times, which is that maybe we are scam artists and clowns lying to the people we pretend to support as much as to ourselves about our impact on the world.
What does the work environment of a workplace where people's jobs are about fighting against abuse look like, you may want to know.
Well now that everything has been burnt down to ashes I'm not gonna mince my words and say it plainly. Me and my colleagues suffered abuse. There are classics like a manager hellbent on micromanaging, breaking the rules he established himself to spy on our calls, and two cases of harassment that went so far that someone resigned. And I’ll tell you what I suffered through.
I’ll preface what I’m about to say with the revelation that I've got nothing for myself but passions and skills that don't make money. My college degree is not aligned with what I like and can bear doing for money. But the recruiters say that behind my face that contorts in bizarre expressions lies “charisma” and “unfathomable potential”, whatever that means.
So I apply to this job and I meet a man, brighter than the sun. He does make a comment about the photo on my CV, but overall the interview goes well. I walk out of there confident.
I would learn later that at around this point in time he collapsed, opened the gates to a long and catastrophic burnout. The decision to hire me was his to take, but because of what happened to him other people took the decision. So I got called back, not by him, but by an HR lady telling me that I did not get the job but can apply to do charity work with one of their partners if I wanted to.
And this is nothing I could have predicted, but I get it. They need me to prove myself in some way, and this is a better answer than “Good luck out there”. So I began charity work for 6 months, charity work that very much eerily resembled the job I would end up taking after I had the opportunity to apply again.
On the second time that I applied they hired me, and thank god. But on a temporary contract.
And this is nothing I could have predicted, but I get it. They need me to prove myself in some way, and this is a better answer than “Good luck out there”. And apparently they have money problems making the future uncertain, and they can just renew the contract if things work out.
I begin working 3 days a week until June 2025, when my contract ends. Then my manager calls me in to have a talk just before it ends. I'm told they have money problems and they have to let me go, the only employee on a temporary contract, to cut costs, but they also tell me that they’re more than happy with my performances and that once things stabilize I will be called back and given a permanent contract.
So I spend the summer with no revenue. It's too late to get a summer job and I cannot apply for unemployment. So I take it easy, run stupid errands for pocket change.
And I'm called again in late September, by a HR lady again. She tells me that they want to hire me again, fulltime and unlike what I was promised, on a temporary contract, because they're tight on money and cannot hire two people part-time. Reminds me of the very first interview I had. I feel betrayed, but more than anything I feel starved for revenue so I put up with it.
From September to December I work like a pig. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I want to prove myself again. They told me I was one of the best employees based on “efficiency” and maybe I should have understood from this that there was no need to prove myself, but at that point I'm not sure of anything they say since they broke that promise.
But it doesn't matter in the end.
In the beginning of December we receive news that we lost the “call to tender”.
For the sake of simplicity I've been leaving out a big piece of the puzzle which I will explain now.
On the very first day I arrived, my colleagues were sharing news about “the call to tender being delayed”. I did not quite understand what that term meant at the time I arrived and I ignored it. Then the term was used again, and again, and again, and again, by my equals and my superiors. I was left in the dark about this for a while, because there was no need to involve me. What I could piece together from various contextual clues is this:
The federation was funded by the government which, in recent years, had allegedly been displeased with our “unprofessionalism” and made plans for a “call to tender” so that our role may be reprised by a different, more “competent” entity (that also requires less money to run). Whoever would win this call to tender would replace us, as we would stop receiving funds and therefore have no choice but be forced to cease operations.
We were of course allowed to join in, so we did, only to lose to our only competitor over a single factor: the amount of money we asked for. I am uncertain about the exact figures, but I believe we asked for 1.2M and they asked for 1M. On this criteria alone, it was decided that we had lost and that the government would fund them instead of us. Strange..! Maybe this was all a ploy by the government to save money.
Losing the call to tender meant that I would be automatically let go regardless of how proficient or desirable I was. And I wasn't quite honest with myself when my employer delivered the news. I told myself that this is all fine, that it was a temporary contract anyway, that none of this concerns me because I was never guaranteed continuity past December 31th of 2025. But then everyone starts talking about what's next. The discussion happens in the form of meetings, which, for some reason, I am called into. Meetings spanning 2 hours, to talk about layoffs with very generous indemnities lasting for up to a year, and opportunities to get training courses, and all that. I sit there, the youngest and least qualified in the room, next to people in their 40s with years of experience and degrees I don't have, and I listen to them talking about all these benefits I would not get. I am not “getting laid off”, I am simply “let go after the end of my temporary contract”.
At around the same time my colleagues become very vocal about how our employer is breaking laws, not paying people adequately when they work on weekends among other things. And I stay out of this but watch the conversations unfold, and as I watch a thought creeps at the back of my head. Something awakens in me, and I examine my work contracts, and immediately my intuition guides me to it. They were supposed to wait 90 days before hiring me again, they only waited 85 days. It may seem petty, but my contract was illegal. I could press charges and ask for my temporary contract to be converted to a fulltime contract, and also receive monetary compensation, equivalent to one month's worth of salary at the bare minimum. It makes me eligible for the unemployment benefits I mentioned earlier too.
Finally I become honest with myself and see the situation for what it truly is.
I have very low self-esteem, for reason I will not go into, and yet I knew I deserved these benefits more than anybody. I was the youngest, the least financially stable, the least qualified in the team, and my employer was robbing me of financial stability and training opportunities even though no money would fall out of his pocket if he had done that.
Two weeks before my temporary contract was supposed to end, I walk into the office and my superior is here. It's just the two of us in there. I ask for 10 minutes of his time and I do not know what my face looks like but I know it's warped.
I ask for the reason why I was lied to. He says it’s money again. I’m not fooled anymore so I cut to the chase and lay it down on him. His face is warped too. He lies in my face, tells me with a dejected expression that “hiring me permanently wasn't quite part of their plan”, like he was a poor victim. I feel my face warp even further. I have very violent thoughts. I want to get up and pin him to the ground. I want to injure this person who is twice my age, twice my net worth, twice my everything.
But nothing happens. I leave the office and begin a day of picking up calls.
I would be called again days later by this same superior. They recognized I was right and took up my offer. They say they don't have the funds to give me what I asked for (which again is the bare minimum I was supposed to gain had I taken them to court), so they want to give me only half of that. Giving me one extra thousand even though they had just received 700.000 euros, a detail they mentioned in passing a week before this call took place, would cause them great grief, apparently. We've come this far and they are lying again.
But I'm a wimp, and my energy is running out, so I give up the fight. Yes please, I accept that you cheat me with the same lie that got us to the point we are at now.
I never understood how much of a toll all this had on me until my body unexpectedly pulled the brakes.
On the morning of December 27th I awoke from a 10 hour sleep, hopelessly drained. This happened before, and I resigned myself to doing what was obvious to do, go back to sleep again.
Then I woke up again at 10PM. I was still in the same state of intense exhaustion. There was confusion but also hunger, so I stood up to make dinner. I did not understand that the next time I would be able to stand up would be in 5 days.
The 5 days that followed were some of the worst I had the displeasure of living. I spent almost all of it in bed, powerless, and frightened, and bored, and gone, staring into the future. Waves of powerlessness and low energy were followed by waves of intense anxiety and thought spirals that seemed like they would never end, until they did.
Finding myself in this situation may have been my own fault in some way. Despite doing this job I understood less than what was expected of me to understand about human psychology (a parallel reminiscent of the several hundred abuse stories I heard that took root in establishments that, in the face of no options and patients clamoring for help, resigned themselves to hire underqualified people), and I initially had no idea what was occurring to me. I was exhausted and no longer able to tell apart which thoughts were mine and which weren’t.
Because I believe the thoughts that entered my ruminations did not all belong to me. I did not believe that words could be alive and latch onto people but now I believe that they do.
I never recovered from this incident. I was never able to return to work and pick up calls ever again.
I'm concerned about the future, but right now I'm more concerned about what occurred to me. I fear that this experience may have permanently altered me. Just a few months ago I was satisfied with a life of quiet solitude. Now I'm starting to see life itself as an uphill battle, where every single day I have to make an effort to do anything and find the strength to occupy myself, look away from intense, episodic melancholy. And I'm not sure if I have the strength to fight that fight until death finds me naturally.
My colleagues suffered similar episodes and recovered, but also unlike me they have more resources than I do. Currently I have little more than me and my sick little brain.
I am clutching the hope that this is temporary, and that now that I am gone and recovering I will eventually reclaim what I lost and carry on with no need to change anything fundamental about who I am and how I live.
But maybe I do need changes to occur in my life. Maybe I need people to show me that when people create bonds it's not always for one person to rip off and control the other. Maybe I need to find a job that shows me that I can work for someone who won’t take advantage of me and my peers.
I guess most people will stop reading before they get here. So thank you if you made it here.
I want you to part with this page not with fear and anxiety, for there is too much of it that plagues this world, but with resolve. Heed my words.
If you're like me, in your twenties, until now you may have neglected reflecting on the distant future and how your life will end if you die of old age, and not for a stupid reason. The world changes rapidly and unpredictably and there is no way to know what it will have to offer whenever you become “old”.
This is true now, this will remain true forever.
Still.
You have to take care of your body, not merely to avoid being sick and diseased now, but for the future, to be independent and capable for as long as possible.
The genetic and hereditary lottery are independent of one's will, and crippling accidents happen wherever and whenever, but after inquiring hundreds of times on the lives people led before they got old I have come to firmly believe that whether you spend the last years of your life at home with minimal to no support or in a nursing home or hospital relying on personnel to do anything is something you have largely control over depending on how well you care for your health.
I pray that you and everyone reading this will retain health.