The hiring manager looked at me and said:
"So… we did a bit of a Google search on your name."
That sentence has been said to me, in various forms, in various rooms, by various people who needed me to know they'd seen what was online before they let the conversation move on. The phrasing varies. The function is identical. It's a small social ritual that does a specific piece of work: it transfers the weight of the disclosure to me, while letting them off the hook for raising it.
I've now been in enough of these moments to see the pattern. And the pattern reveals something about professional shame that I don't think most people who haven't lived through it really understand.
Shame isn't a feeling. It's a transaction.
We talk about shame as an internal experience — something you feel privately, in your body, alone.
That's part of it. But the more honest definition is that shame is a social transaction. It's something that happens between two people, where one of them is being asked to absorb the discomfort of the other one's awareness of something they wish wasn't true.
When the hiring manager says "we did a bit of a Google search", they're not asking me a question. They're announcing that they've handled information they wish they hadn't had to handle, and they need me to manage their discomfort about it. That's the transaction. Their discomfort becomes my responsibility to resolve.
This is why "professional shame" feels so different from private guilt. Private guilt is mine to sit with. Professional shame keeps arriving in other people's offices, again and again, asking me to do something with it on their behalf.
Three encounters, three angles
The ATO once called me about a tax matter from a previous business life. The case worker on the other end of the phone was professional, kind even, but he had to read the file before he could speak to me. I could hear him reading. I could hear his tone shift slightly as he reached the parts about the ban and the bankruptcy. He didn't say anything overtly different after he'd read them, but the call ran differently from then on. I was no longer the citizen calling about a clarification. I was a file with a flag.
A window blinds company I contacted for a quote ran a credit check before sending the estimate, as is their right. The salesperson who eventually called me back was very careful about the wording. "We have some questions about your credit history before we can proceed." It was a quote for blinds. The blinds came later. The flag came first.
The employment provider was the most explicit. The case worker pulled up my profile, glanced at her screen, and said we have to be careful with people in your situation. She wasn't being cruel. She was being honest about how the system she worked inside was going to treat me.
Three different sectors. Three different transactions. Same shape. Same demand: manage my discomfort about you, because I've now seen the file.
What I learned to do with it
For a long time, I tried to pre-empt the transaction. Lead with the disclosure. Get in first. Beat them to the punch.
It didn't work. Pre-emptive disclosure looks like guilt. It just moves the transaction earlier in the conversation. Now the discomfort is in the room from minute one, and we still have the rest of the meeting to get through.
I tried hiding it. That worked even worse. The discovery moment was always going to come, and when it came, the hiding made everything worse because now I was a person who'd hidden something, on top of being a person whose history had been hidden.
What eventually worked — and what I still work at — is treating the disclosure as a piece of factual information about my past, not a piece of identity information about my present. Yes, there's a ban on the ASIC register from 2017. Here's what happened, here's what I learned, here's what I'm doing now. No drama. No grovel. No flinch. The person across the table gets to do whatever they're going to do with that information. That's their call, not mine.
The transaction only works if I accept the weight transfer. When I stop accepting it, the move stops working.
What shame actually wants
What shame wants is for you to absorb other people's discomfort permanently, on their behalf, as a tax on existing.
You don't owe that. You owe accountability for actions. You don't owe a lifetime of social discomfort-management for people who weren't even in your life when those actions happened.
This took me years to separate. Accountability is something I keep doing — repairing what I can, contributing where I can, not repeating the harms. Shame-management for strangers is not part of that bill. I'm not interested in paying it anymore.
The ATO can read the file. The hiring manager can do the Google search. The window blinds company can run the credit check. All of that is fine. None of it requires me to carry their discomfort about what they find.
That's the line I'm now careful about. And it's been one of the most useful things I've learned in this whole rebuild.
Tony Bailey is in recovery, studying counselling at Torrens University, and hosts the podcast Fall From Grace.