Burnt Offerings: On Losing Lawsuits and Winning Your Soul
I could sue. I shouldn't. I won already. Some essays are like an easy stroll. Some are like giving birth (as much as man can say). This is option two.
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“Just sue them.”
The modern Canadian workplace chant—*"Just sue them!"—is the civic equivalent of clapping for Tinkerbell. It assumes that justice is something that can be ordered off the shelf with a retainer and a well-placed sense of indignation.
Permit me to spoil the third act for the streaming generation: litigation is not a climax. It is not narrative closure. It is not catharsis.
It is a sinkhole.
It consumes time, marrow, money, sleep, and sometimes the last coherent fibres of your sanity. I could sue the students and faculty who lied to thousands, the administrator who smiled while twisting the knife, who just let the defamation run and stepped away, the whisperers, the clerics of institutional cowardice.
But this is no courtroom drama. It is not Suits. It is crucifixion in slow motion—on recycled paper, in triplicate.
Armchair barristers chirp at me like a Greek chorus of denial: “File a grievance!” “Go to the Labour Board!” “Try the Tribunal!” Yes, and I’ll be crowned Miss Canada before the next pay cycle. These fantasies are the detritus of bedtime stories—tales where justice descends in the final chapter like a deus ex machina. It doesn’t work that way in the present world of flesh and time. You get buried in paperwork. Gaslit by process. Outmanoeuvred by delay.
The path does not loop back. It crumbles beneath you, a landslide of lost meaning and procedural sludge. You move forward, if only to stay upright. There are no maps. Just the faint pulse of instinct and the oldest command in the book: endure.
Let’s be ruthlessly clear. In this pious age—where being white, male, Jewish, and unrepentant is treated as a controlled substance—justice is not blind.
CUPE 3913 filed one grievance, while OPSEU did nothing, essentially ghosting me like a bad date. No updates. No answers. Just vague mutterings about “committee decisions,” which is bureaucratese for we need someone else to blame when we do nothing.
I know how this ends. The unions cut a side deal, pocket a nod from the administration, and walk away. And I’m left staring at a closed door with “case resolved” scrawled in excrement.
At that point, I’m supposed to chase judicial review, where the success rate hovers just above “getting struck by lightning while winning the lottery.” And of course, there’s the Duty of Fair Representation complaint, which succeeds about as often as Canada wins the World Cup.
Justice in this forum? Let’s not get sentimental. It never was. This is not a woke aberration. Injustice is simply bureaucratic continuity.
The game is rigged. The rules are written in invisible ink. And still, lawyers with the moral clarity of wet dishcloths tell me to file another form, hire another litigator, try a different door.
No.
What they don’t understand is this: it’s not just the cost. It’s the crawl. It’s knowing that to sue them is to voluntarily walk back into the inferno—to hand over your mind, your money, your final thread of sanity to a system designed to eat it all alive. It’s not a legal fight. It’s psychological trench warfare.
Meanwhile, the institution hides behind taxpayer-funded lawyers and mutters the holy phrase, “risk mitigation,” as if that absolves cruelty. They’d rather hand $600-an-hour to some bloodless legal technocrat than admit their machine chews up lives. They don’t need to believe they’re right—they only need to believe they won’t be held accountable. That’s cheaper.
Only now does it wear DEI-branded bifocals and flinch from anything not intersectionally credentialed. It doesn’t see the truth. It sees risk. It doesn’t weigh facts. It weighs optics. It doesn’t deliberate. It manages.
And so the ritual proceeds—humiliation conducted under flickering lights, with clipboards and side conversations, quoting guidelines as if they were gospel and ignoring the rest, as if they were never there. It is not justice. It is theatre. And you, the accused, are cast without audition as the villain in someone else’s morality play.
I. Defamation: The Mirage With a Legal Letterhead
Let’s start with the obvious. Someone lies about you, in print, in public, with malice and flair. They tell thousands, hundreds of thousands online, slam dunk, right? Wrong. There’s no reverse gear on defamation.
I have the evidence. The dates, the screenshots, the sly little messages. A curated archive of cowardice. The Machiavellian choreography of liars too stupid to be subtle and too arrogant to care. The evidence sits there like a coiled serpent on my desktop—proof beyond reasonable doubt, and still, entirely useless.
And here’s what stuns me still: the hatred—volume of it. The sheer amount of venom from strangers who once passed me in hallways, called me a friend, laughed at my jokes, and shared coffee. It’s not disappointment—it’s disgust.
I called Hamas Nazis. That’s it. And now I’m radioactive, irredeemable, a ghost people hate before they remember why.
The defamation wasn’t an accident. It was a campaign. A whisper, then a murmur, then a roar. Lies so thick they began to feel like facts. A caricature drawn in the dark until even my friends began to see me that way. They didn’t ask. They didn’t care. Because people rarely care. They express concern. They perform morality. But they do not care. Not really.
And it hurts more than I expected.
It hurts to know that many friends, acquaintances, and even blood relatives—people who have known me my entire life—didn’t want the truth. They wanted distance. They wanted to stay warm in the herd. Safer to condemn than to question. But this betrayal didn’t create a new reality. It just revealed the old one.
It is a happily clarifying revelation: better two true friends than a thousand who vanish the moment the weather shifts. Better a handful of Jews, who stood by me not out of convenience but conviction, than a stadium of virtue-signalers with memory loss.
But the sharpest wound is my father’s absence. He would have stood with me. Without calculation. Without conditions. And knowing that—knowing he would’ve stood when others fled—makes his death feel heavier now.
He wasn’t just a parent. He was the only family member who didn’t need convincing.
So yes, I am tired. Yes, I’m bruised. But I am not broken. I have stood. I have spoken. I have fought—however uneven the field—and I am still upright. More resolute now. More bonded to truth and to those who live in it.
To sue them would be to crawl back into the burning building that gave me this scorched skin in the first place. It would mean inviting myself to a knife fight where the other side brings red tape and trauma flashbacks. These lawyers—oh, they don’t deal in justice. They deal in procedural attrition, in Kafkaesque delays, in psychological warfare disguised as “process.”
Their weapon is exhaustion, not argument.
You sit, trying to shape words that might matter—only they don’t. Your fingers cramp as the sentence collapses like day-old porridge scraped from the lip of a forgotten bowl and flicked toward the bin. You’re no longer aiming for justice. You’re just trying to be heard above the static.
But why should you be? We have built a culture so deformed by suspicion that the presumption is not innocence but performance. Every word you utter is assumed to be strategic, weaponised, self-serving. A half-truth gilded in pain and lacquered with ulterior motive.
And so truth itself becomes the ghost at the feast. Fragile, trembling, and always one whisper away from being dismissed as inconvenient. We are weakened not because we don’t speak it, but because we assume no one else ever does.
And if truth is this brittle, this breakable, then what are we defending?
What I’ve never quite fathomed is this: why the cruelty? Why the pitiless spite when they’re playing with house money? Is the currency ego? Is it bureaucratic bloodlust? Or is it something even baser—schadenfreude served in committee rooms, passed around like hors d’oeuvres at a virtue-signalling banquet?
They don’t need to be vindictive. But they are. Because they can be. Because power enjoyed without consequence metastasises into something worse than corruption: the casual, recreational attempt to destroy a human being, for sport.
Their evil is also their jail, and I do not have the key, but thank God I am outside of it.
II. Human Rights Tribunals: Saints, Suspects, and State-Sponsored Farce
Behold the modern university’s “Human Rights Office”—a term now as divorced from its meaning as “Democratic” is from North Korea. Staffed by the kind of desk-warmers who once took an online quiz about oppression between Tinder swipes, these are not experts but hall monitors in Birkenstocks.
They skimmed a PDF, guessed C for most of the answers, and have since spent their days waving the word “trauma” like a censer, absolving every fashionably aggrieved supplicant while tossing anyone unfashionable into the nearest oubliette.
Justice, such as it pretends to be here, is little more than bureaucratic kabuki: verdict first, sentence second, evidence last—and only if it’s convenient. The show begins long after the conclusion’s been written. Witnesses unnamed, dates unspecified, particulars unmentioned? Doesn’t matter. If you were accused, you were guilty. We’ve known since Act One. We just needed time to choreograph the processional and schedule the PowerPoint.
These are not procedures; they are rituals. Not trials, but inquisitions.
You’re handed your indictment, told to respond to the allegations that aren’t listed, and asked to prove a negative with a straight face. At the same time, the adjudicators pass around doughnuts and whisper vile directives from the Vice Provost.
If you’re trans, Indigenous, Muslim, or tick any number of progressive lottery squares, you enter the room clad in sanctity. The scales are tilted before the door opens. But if you’re male, over forty, Jewish, articulate, or—God help you—attached to Enlightenment values, you are presumed contaminated.
You are not a professor. You are a specimen. You are the unclean thing. And no one needs to speak to you. Your guilt is embedded in your skin tone, your CV, and your tone of voice. To contest it is to offend further.
In my case, the evidence was doctored by the accuser—edited, falsified, and pre-chewed to fit the desired narrative. They were congratulated. I was suspended.
Not one so-called “human rights professional” asked to see the original. Not one questioned the absence of due process. Instead, they performed their little liturgy of listening and nodding, turned to the nearest administrator for moral instruction, and did exactly what they were told.
There was no investigation. There was reaction, genuflection, and cowardice. The kind that wears a pink ribbon on Thursday and signs off on your execution Friday morning. This isn’t arbitration. It’s an exorcism of the old gods, the old truths, the unfashionable heretics of modern academia—the kind who believe in logic, clarity, fairness—the kind who don’t grovel.
And you stand there, a cartoon villain in their moral fable, knowing they’ve read only the headline, skimmed only the accusation, and clicked send on your ruin without a shred of doubt or a single question asked.
But then—something shifts. Not peace, no. Not forgiveness. Just a dulling.
The ragged, rusty knife edge of bitterness begins to corrode. It’s still there, but it doesn’t have the same effect. You move more. You drink less. You stop needing everyone to understand, because you know they never did. You tell yourself to keep the wound clean, to let it scab over, and find something else to care about. You say it. You don’t quite believe it. But you say it anyway. It will come. Have faith.
Because this was never about justice. Not really. It was about clarity. About refusing to disappear. About shouting not like this into the whirlwind.
So, no—I won’t sue them. Not because they don’t deserve it, but because chasing justice in that arena just means living longer in their hell. You let God sort them out. And if He’s just, I'm hoping He hits them hard. Not with thunder. But with memory. But thunder would do.
Or perhaps with the truth they buried, crawling out of the ground, long after they’ve retired, grinning like a corpse in the light.
III. Victory: A PDF and a Promotion for Your Enemy
Let us say you win through divine intervention, clerical incompetence, or a momentary lapse in the machinery of institutional cowardice. What then?
You get a PDF. Maybe a cheque. Perhaps even a letter stapled by a trembling intern pretending to be contrite on behalf of the university’s legal team. The students who lied walk across the graduation stage, tassel swinging, cheered on by the same crowd that once screamed for your scalp. Likewise, the faculty and staff who lied still shuffle back and forth, their dessicated consciences rattling a little if you listen.
The Human Rights manager is quietly promoted, celebrated for their groundbreaking work in “trauma-informed exclusion” and “restorative denunciation.”
And you? You remain a search result. A smear. A professional pariah with your digital corpse pinned permanently to page one of Google. Reputation doesn’t come with a Ctrl+Z function. There is no recall on character assassination.
You become a cautionary tale told in hushed tones, a scandalous ghost story the interns whisper over their oat milk lattes. “Don’t be like him. Don’t say the thing.”
Because justice—such as it is in this late hour of our civic dusk—is no longer tethered to truth.
It’s tethered to narrative. Not what happened, but what should have happened. Not who you are, but who you resemble, someone with the right ideology and a taste for vengeance.
And narrative, dear reader, isn’t written in laws or governed by facts. It’s brewed in HR meetings, whispered in break rooms, etched into DEI training slides and coffee mugs. You might catch it skulking at the edge of a meeting. You might hear it switch topics when you walk into the room. But mostly, it stays hidden. Like black mould. Like guilt. Like rot.
IV. Psychological Shrapnel
I’m not usually one for the jargon-padded racket of pop-psych, but let’s be clear: institutional betrayal and PTSD are as real as a pistol in the mouth or a body dangling off the back end of a news brief.
You’ll hear it in the hush of corridors: “You remember him, right? The guy they stitched up and tossed like a banana peel two years back? Yeah. Dead. Car crash. Though between us, the seatbelt wasn’t buckled, and the garage door was closed.”
It’s marvellous, really—how quickly the serotonin-stuffed sermonisers of “wellness” vanish once the injury isn’t theoretical. As long as trauma remains a PowerPoint slide—fodder for panel discussions, HR brochures, and lanyards—it’s everyone’s cause.
But once your name is on the letterhead of a WSIB diagnosis, signed by an actual physician and no longer deniable, you’ll find their famed compassion has gone the way of the company Christmas party: budgeted out.
A dog barks in my ear, I jump, and I’m helicoptered straight back to the academic frontlines—not under fire, but surrounded by that slow, vicious warfare of innuendo and procedural sadism. These aren’t dreams. They’re stenographic records—minutes of meetings where smiling apparatchiks smirk before stabbing you in the kidneys with a policy memo.
The same pastel-scarf HR sentinels who cry on LinkedIn over ‘Bell Let’s Talk1’ become, at the whiff of liability, grunting middle managers from the Bronze Age: “What you need is a strong coffee and to pull your socks up.”
The transition is seamless. One moment, they’re talking about “safe spaces,” the next, they’re channelling their inner Archie Bunker.
At the University of Guelph, the moment my PTSD became real, provable, insurable, billable, they reacted not with support, but with fury. I didn’t become a patient. I became a cost centre. Compassion was revoked, compassion shelved, and I was recast as a saboteur in their budget spreadsheet.
They’d sooner fork over $600 an hour to some bloodless legal mandarin than part with a single dime admitting their sacred machine chews through lives—slowly, methodically, like a Komodo dragon gnawing at something it didn’t bother to kill.
Acknowledging wrongdoing? Utterly heretical. The fierce, mad denial is never spoken, but the idea is clung to with such white-knuckled devotion that it might as well be a conjoined twin they keep tucked under a scarf, whispering reassurances into its ear.
So they gaslight. They stall. They barricade the exits. And when you begin to falter—when your mind misfires, when the fog rolls in and you can’t quite recall which version of your story is the least incriminating—they jot it down, clinical as ever: not as a consequence of their campaign, but as validation for it. See? He was unravelling all along. We were right to pull the thread.
This isn’t negligence. It’s doctrine.
I replay conversations like courtroom exhibits, each one cross-examined in the privacy of my commute. I rehearse the tribunal that will never come, perfecting retorts for an audience that has long since scrolled on. The blood still boils, now and then—uninvited, unwelcome—but it doesn’t make a sound.
It doesn’t leak out into the world. And even if it did, it wouldn’t matter. Those who never cared would simply shift their little HR pawns across the chessboard, with eyes on policy, not people.
Because in the end, this was never about resolution. It was theatre—ritual humiliation, public shaming with a PowerPoint and a smile. Justice was just the dress code. The point was to make you kneel, and to make it appear as though it was an act of inclusion.
And what does that justice look like? A courtroom trauma loop. A bureaucratic haze where your reward is to be gaslit at a higher hourly rate. Healing is not on the docket—only mutilation with a civilised accent.
This doesn’t resolve. It ossifies. It turns you into a reluctant librarian of your decline—a sleepless curator of the grotesque archive that used to be your career.
VI. The Last Court
When you’re left alone, the glorious ‘sue them’ abandoned the institution has won by their measure of victory—not with trumpets, but with the soft efficiency of bureaucracy, like euthanasia by form letter.
Still, I got a few licks in on the way down. And I have no doubt the architects of this little purge will be walked out in six months or a year—escorted gently out the side door, holding a plant and an NDA.
But me?
I sit with the dogs now. They don’t flinch when the story gets dark. The music’s always loud, and blessedly indifferent to polite company. I breathe easier when doors close. I don’t want to mingle. I don’t want to explain. I just want the noise in my head to harmonise with something louder than itself.
Now and then, foolishly, I reach out to colleagues, to ghosts. The place used to hum with wit, rebellion, bad coffee, and better arguments. Now it’s heavy. Every smile feels like a consent form.
You speak your story and watch their gaze drift over your shoulder, already searching for the exit. You start to bore them. Worse, you bore yourself.
It’s an out-of-body loop: the same disbelief, the same cold sting of betrayal climbing up your throat like acid reflux. How could they? How could so many nod along while they burned you at the stake, built from their unread policy manuals?
And the answer is always the same: because they could. Because cowardice isn’t an anomaly—it’s infrastructure. The house always wins. And nobody likes to hear a story without a happy ending.
So what’s left?
The ragged, rusty knife-edge of bitterness dulls with time—not gone, not healed, but cleaner. I stay off the booze. I walk the dog. I keep the wound clean and try, stubbornly, to care about something else. Sometimes I even believe myself when I say I’ll move on.
This was never about victory—it was about clarity. About getting up. Not understanding, not forgiveness—those are luxuries. But faith—the thing hoped for, not yet seen. And in the meantime, I turn up the music. Loud. Old Testament loud.
If vengeance must come, let it come from above. In the courts of heaven, where truth holds sway—let God sort them out.
Because frankly, He’ll do a better job of it than I ever could.
So I write. Ink. Essay. Fire.
If I’m to be dismantled, let it be loudly. Dylan Thomas warned us not to go gentle, and I won’t. I rage against the euphemism-slinging bureaucrats who mistake paperwork for penance. But the rage is not blind fury—it is clarity.
My words are a kindness, a last-ditch admonition aimed at hearts long calloused, arteries thickened with cowardice and bad faith. Let them hear it, if only once, before their souls rot entirely into policy.
So I move. I keep the wounds clean. I exercise. I chase something that might be healing. I find something else to care about. Or at least I pretend to.
And yes—people say, just sue them.
No, thank you. I have already won.
To engage them?, It’s a slow, soul-consuming grind that forces you to live in their filth longer than any sane person should. The courtroom becomes an extension of the abuse. The law, in its infinite decorum, offers trauma with better lighting.
It is no longer about justice; she left a long time ago.
It’s about getting up, grabbing hold of something unseen. Of being certain in what you do not see. Of turning up the music loud enough to drown out the echo of your name that somehow appeared on a stranger’s hit list.
And so I say again, let God sort them out. Let the scale tilt in some higher court where truth holds sway and the smug bastards are finally shown their measure. I hope He hits them hard, one day, not with fire, but with memory.
But fire if memory is not available.
Because the victory in the end is knowledge that they know nothing about winning, they were never even in the game. My efforts were never about revenge. They were about clarity, about not disappearing. But that is done now. I never kneeled.
VII. Through the Fire: What Victory Is
They told me to sue, as if that were salvation. As if justice were a vending machine—drop in a retainer, press “Defamation,” and out pops vindication with a ribbon and receipt. But justice isn’t dispensed like candy. It’s a furnace. And the courts? They’re just better wallpapered hellmouths, where polite men in robes administer slow-motion crucifixion behind frosted glass.
Their game was never meant to be won—just played until you collapsed. The halls of procedural justice are lined with low-burning torches and bloodless mandarins who speak in footnotes and feign impartiality, even as they sharpen their rules into razors.
Their hell isn’t molten—it’s steam-powered, beige, and endlessly audited. It smells of bad coffee and better excuses. A bureaucratic Gehenna where human souls are processed by email thread, and the demons carry lanyards.
But something happened in that furnace. When you stand in fire long enough, you either turn to ash, or you see.
And I saw.
I saw that what they call strength—cruelty with a policy number, sanctimony in committee—is just moral cowardice with good lighting. I saw the lie for what it was: a costume drama for the insecure, choreographed to silence anyone who dared to speak plainly.
I stopped begging. I stopped explaining. And I did something else.
I lit the archive.
I struck a match on the whole fetid record: the doctored evidence, the fake investigations, the complicit silences, the solemn HR smirks—the carefully filed cowardice.
I lit it all—not in vengeance, but in liberation.
Because they don’t get to live in my mind anymore, they don’t get to linger like rot in the walls.
Then I am walking away.
Not in pain, not in surrender, but with purpose. Through the fire, yes—but not even singed. I walk through it with faith. With the strength that doesn’t come from strategy, but from knowing you told the truth even when it cost everything. That kind of strength does not scream. It stands.
Because real victory isn’t reclaiming your desk or your inbox or even your name on the syllabus, it’s the clarity that no institution, no tribunal, no union or warden of fake justice can ever provide.
It is knowing, finally, that the arc of history bends not toward justice, but toward truth—and that you had the spine to speak it, even while the mob lit the pyre.
They are still down there, of course, in their wailing, humid pit of grievance theatre and pink-scarf persecution. Still muttering about “unwelcome conduct” and “restorative language,” still performing autopsies on their conscience, hoping no one notices the rigour mortis.
They’ve lost. And they know it.
Because I left the building they built to burn me, and I am still standing.
And the building?
It’s still on fire.
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Bell Let’s Talk is Canada’s annual exercise in corporatised compassion, where a major telecom monopoly—Bell Canada—spends one day a year pretending to care about mental health, provided you tweet their hashtag and boost their brand equity. For every retweet or TikTok-worthy platitude, Bell donates five cents to mental health initiatives—roughly the cost of one minute on their overpriced phone plan.
It’s like if Comcast held a #LetsBeKindDay, sponsored by their call center hold music, and expected applause for it.
Meanwhile, the same company that lays off employees with PTSD and throttles internet access in rural hospitals basks in praise for its “commitment to wellness.” They install “Mindfulness Rooms” in their offices while underpaying the therapists they sponsor. It’s feel-good capitalism at its most cynical: monetizing misery, packaging suffering into a social media campaign, and calling it progress.
Because in Canada, nothing says “we care about mental illness” like a billion-dollar telecom monopoly asking the depressed to boost their Q1 visibility.
I went through something similar during virtual school, when I spoke the truth I thought my school wanted to hear. Instead, they wanted to destroy me. You put into words so much of how I feel. The institutional betrayal, the PTSD.