The Weight of Two Contracts
I am Dr. Ilias. For most of my professional life I have been a physiologist — a man of nerve impulses and muscle fibres, of measurable inputs and predictable outputs.
Then, 1 year ago, I accepted a part-time position as the school psychologist at the European Academy — a decision I made partly out of curiosity, partly because a colleague insisted I was “good with people,” and partly, if I am being honest, because the extra income was welcome. I kept my general practice in the mornings and spent my afternoons in a small office on the second floor of the school, wedged between a music storage closet and a stairwell that always smelled faintly of floor polish.
I had expected the work to be quiet. It was not.
There was the 14-year-old girl who stopped eating in November because her parents’ divorce had taught her that the only thing she could control was what entered her own body. There was the boy in Year 10 who punched a locker so hard he fractured his metacarpal, and when I asked him why, he said, “Because the locker doesn’t hit back.” There was the girl who faked illness every Monday morning because weekends at her father’s house were something she could not describe in words but her stomach described fluently. There was the quiet one, the one everyone said was “fine,” who sat in the back row drawing spirals in his notebook, and who one Tuesday afternoon slid a folded note under my door that read: I don’t want to die. I just want everything to stop for a while.
These were my afternoons. This was the country I had entered.
And then, one day in middle of June— when the school year was winding down and the hallways had that exhausted, sun-bleached feeling that comes before summer — something strange happened. Something I was not prepared for. Not a student, but a teacher knocked on my door.
3 quick raps, then silence, then 1 more — as if the hand behind the door had reconsidered and then reconsidered again.
“Come in,” I said.
The door opened, and there stood Raigo, the physics teacher. Raigo was a tall man with a narrow, serious face and the kind of posture that suggested he had once been told to stand up straight and had never forgotten. He had been at the school since mid-August — arrived on time, prepared his syllabus before term began, volunteered for the science fair committee without being asked. He taught thermodynamics and wave mechanics to 16-year-olds with a quiet intensity, and he was liked by students in the grudging way that demanding teachers sometimes are — resented in October, appreciated by May. He was, in every measurable sense, reliable.
“Ilias,” Raigo said, still standing in the doorway as though the room were a body of water he was not sure he wanted to enter. “Do you have a moment?”
“I have several. Sit down.”
Raigo sat. He placed his hands flat on his knees, then moved them to the armrests, then folded them in his lap. I noticed all of this without appearing to notice any of it — a skill that had taken years of clinical practice to cultivate, and that I now considered the most essential tool of both my professions.
“I don’t know if this is the sort of thing you deal with,” he began.
“Tell me and we’ll find out together.”
Raigo exhaled. And then, in the careful, measured language of a man who has rehearsed a speech but is determined not to sound like it, he told me everything.
It had begun in March. The school had approached Raigo with a request: there were additional teaching hours that needed covering — a gap in the timetable, a staffing problem dressed up as an opportunity. Would he be willing to take on extra classes? Of course he would. Raigo was the kind of man who said yes to institutions the way some people say yes to relatives — out of obligation, out of loyalty, out of a deep and possibly misplaced belief that the institution would, in return, say yes to him.
But the way they had done it troubled him. Rather than revising his employment contract to reflect the new reality of his workload, the school had issued what they called an appendix — a supplementary document, stapled to the original like an afterthought. The original contract, with its original terms, remained untouched, pristine, as though nothing had changed. And the dates on the appendix ran from the 15th of March to the 19th of June.
“The 19th,” Raigo repeated, and I heard it — the way the date itself had become, for him, a small sharp object. “My general contract runs until the 30th. 11 days, Ilias. They shaved 11 days off the end.”
I nodded slowly. “And the salary?”
This was where Raigo’s voice changed. It dropped half a register, the way voices do when they approach a wound.
“2400 euros,” he said. “That’s what they gave me. But I’ve since learned — I know now — that a full-time teacher in the same department, at the same level, the base salary is 2720.”
He let the number sit between us.
“320 euros a month,” I said quietly.
“Every month. Since August. But that’s not even — that’s not even the thing, Ilias.”
And here is where Raigo told me what he had found. Not what someone had told him. What he had seen with his own eyes.
It was the final week of term. The school year was gasping its last breath. Raigo was cleaning his desk — that ritual of small surrenders, the emptying of drawers, the discarding of outdated handouts — when he found it. A document, left on the shared desk in the department office. A contract. Not his.
It belonged to Maximilian.
Maximilian was a literature teacher who had arrived at the school in February — not August, like Raigo, but February, halfway through the year, as though the academic calendar were a party he had wandered into late. And the document Raigo was now holding told a very different story from the one stapled to his own file.
For Maximilian, there had been no appendix. No supplementary page stapled to an unchanged original. The school had rewritten his contract entirely. The new document specified 23 teaching hours per week, clearly defined, with a total salary of 2600 euros per month. And the dates — this is what Raigo could not stop looking at, could not stop turning over in his mind like a coin he had found on the ground — the dates ran from the 15th of March to the 30th of June.
The 30th.
Not the 19th. The 30th!
“The same school,” Raigo said. “The same HR office. The same kind of request. 2 completely different treatments.” He looked at me, and his expression was not angry — not yet — but it contained within it the raw materials from which anger is carefully, reluctantly built. “200 euros less than him. But Ilias, honestly — the money is not the important thing. The way the school treats you. That is the problem.”
He was right, and I think he knew I knew it, because he stood up then, nodded once — a curt, dignified nod, the nod of a man who has said what he came to say — and left.
After Raigo left, I sat for a long time in the pale afternoon light. The fern on my windowsill needed water. I did not water it.
I was thinking about Maximilian. I knew him, though not well — the way a school psychologist knows everyone, in fragments, in corridor glimpses, in the stories that other people tell when they think no one is assembling the pieces. What I had observed was this: Maximilian spent most of his free periods on his phone. Not texting, not scrolling idly, but doing something with a particular kind of absorbed, compulsive intensity — the hunched posture, the rapid thumb movements, the way his face would flash between elation and something darker. Trading. Some kind of online gambling. I had seen the apps over his shoulder once, charts with green and red candles flickering like a heartbeat. It was the posture of a man feeding a slot machine, and the machine was in his pocket, and it never closed.
He had also, I knew, spoken openly about leaving the school. He had arrived in February and by March was already looking elsewhere — restless, noncommittal, one foot always pointed toward the exit. He was the kind of employee that institutions describe as “dynamic” when they want to keep him and “unreliable” when they don’t.
And yet the school had given him the better contract. The full month. The clean document, not the appendix!
I found myself thinking about a word. The word was printed on a banner that hung in the main corridor of the school, just above the entrance to the assembly hall, where visitors could see it and parents could be reassured by it and students could walk beneath it every day without ever looking up. The banner read:
DIVERSITY — EQUITY — INCLUSION
3 words in bold capitals, separated by dashes, as though they were a logical progression from one noble principle to the next. I had walked beneath that banner a hundred times. I had never before considered the possibility that it was decorative.
Equity. The word turned in my mind like a stone in a tumbler. I knew what equity meant — not merely treating people the same, but treating them according to their need. Equality says: everyone gets the same-sized shoes. Equity says: everyone gets shoes that fit. It is the more demanding principle, the more human one, because it requires you to actually look at the person standing in front of you and ask what they carry.
And I knew things about Raigo that the banner did not. I knew that Raigo had a wife and 2 children — a daughter of 8 who was learning the cello, badly and joyfully, and a son of 4 who was afraid of the vacuum cleaner. I knew that his wife worked part-time at a translation agency and that the family lived in a modest apartment where the heating bill in winter was a recurring source of quiet dread. I knew these things not because Raigo had told me in this meeting, but because he had told me in other conversations, in other months, in the slow, accidental way that people reveal the architecture of their lives to someone whose door is always open.
If equity meant anything — if it was more than ink on a banner — then Raigo, with his dependents and his modest apartment and his heating bills, should have been the one to receive the more generous terms. Not because Maximilian deserved less, but because equity demands that you account for what a person carries on his back when he walks through the school gates every morning.
But the school had not applied equity. It had not even applied equality!
It had applied something else — something arbitrary, something without a name on the banner, something that I, in my more cynical moments, might have called administrative convenience and in my more honest moments might have called indifference.
Or — and here my mind moved into territory that felt less like analysis and more like diagnosis — something deeper.
I found myself thinking about Maria!
Maria was the school’s HR manager. She was an efficient woman of about 45, with close-cropped silver hair and a manner that could be described as briskly cordial. She processed contracts, managed leave requests, coordinated with the directorate, and kept the administrative machinery of the school running with a competence that no one questioned and few people thought about. She was, in the language of my other profession, a gatekeeper — a person who controls access to resources without appearing to make decisions about them.
But gatekeepers always make decisions. They make them in the margins, in the details, in the difference between an appendix and a rewritten contract, between the 19th of June and the 30th!
And now, sitting alone in my office with the afterimage of Raigo’s bewildered face still floating before me, I began to wonder about Maria. Not with accusation — I would never frame it that way, not even to myself — but with the professional curiosity of a man who has spent decades studying the invisible machinery that drives human behaviour.
I wondered whether Maria, consciously or not, was drawn to instability.
It was a strange thing to favor. But I had seen it before, in other institutions, in other gatekeepers. There are people who are drawn to those who might leave — not out of cruelty, but out of a deep and unexamined need to be the one who makes them stay. The unstable employee becomes a project, a rescue, a proof of one’s own indispensability. You give them the better contract, the cleaner terms, the full month of June — not because they deserve it more, but because the act of giving feels like holding, and holding feels like control, and control feels like safety!
And the stable ones? The Raigo of the world, who show up, who say yes, who do not threaten to leave? They get the appendix. They get the 19th. They get the lesser number, because their loyalty is assumed and assumed things are never paid for.
“We reward what frightens us. We neglect what reassures us.“
Maybe Maria needs help! Maria needs a pair of ears to be heard!
But how?
I sat with this question the way I sit with most questions — not rushing toward an answer, but letting the silence do its work. And in the silence, several paths presented themselves, each with its own difficulty.
Perhaps Raigo should not take this personally. Perhaps it truly was an unwitting administrative error — 2 contracts processed on different days, by a distracted hand, with no intent behind the discrepancy. Perhaps the simplest explanation was the truest one, and Raigo would be better served by walking into Maria’s office and saying, calmly, clearly: I noticed a difference. Can we talk about it?
But I knew Raigo. His personality was not built for confrontation. He was a man who absorbed unfairness the way a sponge absorbs water — silently, completely, until one day the weight of it became unbearable. He would not go to Maria. He would carry the 19th of June inside him like a stone, and it would calcify into something harder than disappointment.
So perhaps I could help. Perhaps I could speak with Maria directly — not as an investigator, but as a colleague. As a friend. But this was where the terrain became treacherous. How do you tell someone that their unconscious patterns are visible? How do you say, I think you favour the ones who might leave because someone maybe once left you, and the wound never healed, without it sounding like an attack? Maria would need to feel, in her bones, that I was not the enemy. That I was someone who wanted to help her become free.
Free from what?
Free from the invisible loyalty she was paying to an old wound. Free from the compulsion to rescue the restless while neglecting the faithful. Free from the story her nervous system kept telling her — that love must be earned by preventing departure, that stability is boring, that the ones who stay don’t need anything because they are already here.
I could speak with the school director. I could frame it in the neutral language of institutional fairness — I’ve noticed some inconsistencies in how contract extensions are handled, and I think it would be worth reviewing the process. This was the safe path, the procedural path. But procedures do not heal people. They correct paperwork.
What Maria needed was not a corrected process but an atmosphere of openness — a space where she could examine her own patterns without shame. And that atmosphere does not come from directives or audits. It comes from trust, yes, TRUST…. From someone sitting across from her and saying, gently, honestly: I see something. I think it matters. And I think I can help, if you’ll let me.
Whether she would let me — that, I could not know.
I closed my notebook and leaned back in my chair. The fern was still unwatered. The school was emptying — chairs scraping, locker doors slamming, buses pulling away into the long northern evening.
And in the quiet that followed, a thought came to me that was not about Raigo or Maria or Maximilian at all. It was about myself.
If I were in Raigo’s place — if I were the one holding the appendix, the lesser contract, the 19th instead of the 30th — what would I have done?
And I knew the answer immediately, because I knew myself. I would have accepted it. Without discussion. Without complaint. I would have folded the document, placed it in a drawer, and gone back to teaching, because that is what I have always done. That is what my body learned to do long before my mind had any say in the matter.
My father was a totalitarian man. Not cruel in the way that makes for dramatic stories — no raised fists, no shattered dishes. His tyranny was quieter than that. It was the tyranny of absolute authority exercised absolutely, of a household where his word was not merely law but physics — as immutable and as unchallengeable as gravity. You did not argue with my father. You did not negotiate. You did not say, But this is unfair. You said, Yes. You said, Of course. And you carried whatever weight was placed on your shoulders, because to set it down was to cease to exist in his eyes, and the fear of that disappearance was worse than any burden.
I have spent a lifetime unlearning this. I have spent a lifetime learning that silence is not the same as peace, that acceptance is not the same as strength, that the man who never complains is not noble — he is afraid.
And yet the pattern persists. It lives in my muscles, in my posture, in the way I instinctively fold when authority speaks. I am Raigo. I am the man who takes the appendix and says nothing.
But I am also — and this is the part that saves me, the part I hold onto when the old patterns pull — a man of faith. A religious man, though I wear it quietly, the way I wear most things. And my faith has given me a lens that my father never could: the belief that even the things that wound us are working toward something we cannot yet see.
I lost my earthly father to his own rigidity. But I found, or was found by, a heavenly Father — and perhaps that is the truest thing I can say about my life. That the search for a father who would not crush me led me upward. That the gap left by a man who could not love without controlling was filled, slowly, imperfectly, by a presence that asked nothing of me but honesty.
And from that place — that quiet, imperfect faith — I have come to believe something that I cannot prove but that I feel in the same way I feel my own heartbeat: that even my enemies are working in my favour. That the difficulties placed before me — the unfair contracts, the silent wounds, the patterns I inherited and cannot quite shed — are not punishments. They are the resistance that builds the muscle. They are the weight that, if I carry it honestly, makes me strong enough to set it down.
Raigo came to me today with a problem I cannot solve. Maria carries a wound she does not know she has. Maximilian feeds a machine in his pocket that will never love him back. And I sit in this small room between the music closet and the stairwell, a physiologist who wandered into the country of the soul, trying to understand why institutions that write EQUITY on their walls cannot seem to practise it in their offices.
I do not have an answer. But I have this: the belief that the asking matters. That paying attention is itself a kind of repair. That the fern on my windowsill will survive another day without water, but the people in this building will not survive forever without someone noticing what is being done to them — and what they are doing to themselves.
I watered the fern. I closed my notebook. I turned off the light.
And I carried it all home with me — the numbers, the names, the patterns, the faith — the way I always do. The way, I suspect, I always will.
Let the difficulties come. They are making me ready for something I cannot yet name.