CONSENT

July 31, 2026

I used to think consent belonged mostly to medicine and sex.

Perhaps that’s because I was raised to respect both legislation and boundaries.

I assumed professionals did too.

I assumed that if someone was entrusted with extraordinary access to another person’s life, they also understood the extraordinary restraint that should accompany it.

I no longer make that assumption.

Now I see consent everywhere.

Not consent forms.

Not paperwork.

Human consent.

The quiet understanding that before a professional relationship becomes personal, before information collected for one purpose enters another conversation, before someone decides what belongs in the room, another human being has the right to agree.

Or not.

I’ve spent decades in executive leadership.

I’ve been entrusted with employment matters.

Financial records.

Personal disclosures.

Information people assumed would remain within the purpose for which it had been entrusted.

I never viewed that access as power.

I viewed it as responsibility.

Just because I knew something didn’t mean I had the right to use it.

The privilege was never access.

The privilege was restraint.

Somewhere we’ve confused the two.

A dentist doesn’t ask about your body count.

An accountant doesn’t ask about your last physical examination.

Not because those questions are illegal.

Because they don’t belong.

Now imagine they already knew.

Not because you told them.

Because another system held the information.

Would that suddenly make it appropriate?

Or would the violation simply look different?

The information isn’t the point.

The relationship is.

The purpose is.

The consent is.

We’ve become remarkably comfortable confusing access with permission.

They aren’t the same thing.

If anything, they’re opposites.

The more access you’re entrusted with, the greater your responsibility to exercise restraint.

I’ve started wondering if the minimum ethical requirement around personal information should simply be consent.

Not whether legislation technically permits something.

Not whether policy allows it.

Consent.

Before a professional relationship becomes personal.

Before information collected for one purpose quietly enters another conversation.

Before someone decides the boundaries of the relationship have changed without the agreement of the person sitting across from them.

Personalizing a professional relationship without consent doesn’t simply cross a boundary.

It changes the relationship itself.

It creates a power imbalance where one person decides what belongs in the conversation while the other discovers the boundaries have already shifted.

That’s violating.

I’ve experienced that more than once.

By the same system.

The first experience leaves room for explanation.

The second changes the question.

I’m no longer asking whether it was appropriate.

I’m asking what responsibility exists beyond legislation.

Because legislation doesn’t create ethics.

It creates enforceable boundaries around the places where society repeatedly failed to honour the invisible ones first.

Duty of care doesn’t begin with legislation.

It begins with humanity.

With compassion.

With the discipline to stop and ask,

Does this belong here?

And if the answer isn’t obvious,

Do I have this person’s consent to take the conversation there?

I’ve spent decades surrounded by things that looked one way and behaved completely differently.

People lie.

Systems protect themselves.

Power has an extraordinary ability to redefine reality for the person holding less of it.

Eventually I stopped trusting what was said.

Not because I wanted to.

Because experience repeatedly taught me that behaviour was often the more honest language.

You can explain away one experience.

You can even explain away two.

Tell yourself you’re reading too much into it.

That you’re becoming cynical.

That there must be another explanation.

Until one day you realize you’ve spent years trying to explain away the same feeling wearing different clothes.

At some point you stop asking whether each experience was an exception.

You start asking whether you’ve been looking at the same pattern all along.

If I can leave a room questioning my own experience after decades of executive leadership and governance, what happens to the person with less power?

How often do they leave believing the violation belongs to them instead of the person or system that created it?

Maybe that’s why I paint the way I do.

People aren’t polished.

We have wrinkles.

We have scars.

We have life written across our faces.

I don’t erase those things because I don’t see them as imperfections.

I experience them as beauty.

After spending so much of my professional life trying to reconcile words with behaviour, my eye found comfort in what couldn’t pretend.

That’s what I draw.