A Wish, Not a Need

By David Crush | Neurodivergence | 6 min read

Editorial cartoon: an anxious employee, hand pressed to his chest, stands locked outside a glass office door holding a phone showing unanswered messages, beside a badge reader glowing red and a wall sign reading forgot your badge? with nothing written under the heading; inside, a confetti poster reads welcome back to the office over a reception desk holding an overflowing tray labeled wishes and an empty cobwebbed tray labeled needs.

I forgot my badge one morning. That is the entire inciting event of this essay: a rectangle of plastic on a counter at home.

I arrived at the office I was required to be in four days a week and could not get in the building. I asked for help on Slack. Nobody answered. My boss was out that day. My senior manager did not respond. There was no posted procedure, no documented backup, nothing anywhere that said what a cast member locked out of a mandated office was supposed to do next. So I stood outside the building, watching my messages sit unanswered, and my rejection sensitivity kicked in — Part 1 describes what that does to me. The silence did not read as an inconvenience. It read as abandonment. I had a panic attack in front of a building I was ordered to report to.

Afterward, nobody took it seriously. It was worse than that — I was made to feel bad about having had the panic attack at all. The response amounted to: “It’s not a big deal.”

Let me be precise about the claim, because it is narrower than “the company gave me anxiety.” It did not. My anxiety is lifelong. I brought it with me to the job, the way I brought my autism and my ADHD — Part 1 is that bill. This one is the anxiety bill, and the claim is this: the company created the conditions that triggered a lifelong condition, was told so, could have prevented the repeat for roughly the cost of one afternoon, and declined — repeatedly, on the record, until the day I left.

The Missing Document

It is not hard to put together a procedures document. What to do if you forget your badge. Who to contact. Who covers when that person is out. A page, maybe two. An afternoon of somebody’s time — and if any afternoon was ever owed, it was this one, because they were the ones mandating the return. They wanted us in the building. They did not want to put in the time and effort of doing it the right way.

The gap between the mandate and the effort did not fall on everyone evenly. A person without anxiety shrugs at a locked door, gets coffee, waits it out. A person with anxiety pays for the same locked door in panic. So the people the office was hardest on — the ones already paying the commute bill (Part 5) into the building that was never ready (Part 2) — were once again the ones left to pick up the slack and suffer for it.

“That Is a Job”

I pointed out the gap. Nothing changed.

And it was not one bad day. On multiple occasions, when I raised legitimate issues — issues that triggered my lifelong anxiety — the answer that came back was some version of the same sentence: “That is a job.”

Hold that sentence up to the light and watch what it does. The discomfort is declared a feature of employment. Describing the discomfort therefore becomes complaining. And the need underneath it becomes optional. That is the reclassification at the bottom of this entire series: my needs were treated as wishes. A wish is something you grant when you are feeling generous. A need is something you owe. The storage closet in Part 1 was a wish granted, not a need met, and the difference between those two sentences is the difference between the posters and the practice.

The two dismissals work as a set. “It’s not a big deal” dismisses the suffering. “That is a job” dismisses the cause. Between them, there is no version of the problem the company ever has to own.

Leaders have responsibilities past their own day to day. They are in charge of people. When one of your people brings you a problem, the problem is part of your job — not extra credit for the generous ones. The position itself. “That is a job” translates cleanly: suck it up, deal with it. That is not management. That is the refusal of it.

And the dismissals were policy, not mood. The company ran an official speak-up program — its whole purpose was for cast members to raise it when something does not feel right. I spoke up, exactly as instructed. One of my managers told me he did not believe in that program. He said it out loud, as a position. I was shut down by a man who had announced in advance that the mechanism did not apply to him. He did not believe in his own job.

That is the irony I cannot get past. The people telling me “that is a job” did not want to do their own jobs. The manager who dismissed the speak-up program made it explicit, but it was the pattern everywhere: fielding the problems your people bring you is the job of being in charge of people. I was not asking for much. I was asking them to do the job they actually had. “That is a job” was correct all along. It was pointed at the wrong person.

If you think “suck it up and deal with it” is an appropriate answer to an employee in 2026, I do not know what to say to you.

The Clock

Part 1 documents the teammates — people with no diagnosis at all — who described their regular panic attacks. This was a workplace where panic was a known, recurring event, and there was still no procedure for the single most predictable failure a badge system has: someone, someday, forgetting the badge.

On the day I left the company, the document still did not exist. The prevention cost an afternoon. They had every working day between my panic attack and my resignation to spend it, and they never did. That is not a backlog problem. That is a decision, demonstrated one day at a time, that it was not worth anyone’s time.

The badge is the part I keep coming back to. Not the lobby, not the unanswered messages. A rectangle of plastic on a kitchen counter, holding up the entire return-to-office apparatus by itself — because nobody upstairs ever wrote down what happens without it.

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