This installment examines what happens when a workplace treats a person as toggleable in its systems. The body does not forget the instability. It records it. Part Four traces how hypervigilance, panic, and exhaustion emerge not from weakness, but from prolonged exposure to organizational harm.

The most devastating harm in a workplace rarely arrives through shouting. It arrives through silence. Part Two examines the manager who held authority without responsibility, and how their refusal to claim the employee became its own form of injury — one that eroded confidence, blurred accountability, and revealed the deeper architecture of an unstable system.

When a manager refuses to claim responsibility, the harm doesn’t come through conflict. It comes through absence. Part Two exposes how avoidance, scattered feedback, and hidden workload ethics quietly dismantle a person’s stability.

Part One of a six-essay series exploring how unstable workplace structures and vague leadership expectations create slow, cumulative harm. This narrative is a conceptual examination, not a depiction of real events, showing how systems can quietly erode a person’s stability long before collapse becomes visible.