What should I have done?

I am suffering from trauma due to an incident in the past and need your view as to what you would have done in my shoes. This might be a tad bit long but worth it - it is probably less about mental health and more about what you would do in terms of office politics: Joined a well-known startup in Europe as a Jr. Operations Manager. This startup is very well-known and has IPO'd already. 80% of the people - my manager included - were < 35 years old. Cue the following events occurred: > My role emulated that of an Internal Consultant working with overhauling the Customer Service processes in a short span of time. Naturally, there was some resistance from said department - rather than supporting me for the task that he himself assigned, my manager used to publicly throw me under the bus in front of everyone, berating any comment I shared during meetings. > 3 weeks after I joined, the CS lead emailed how I talk down which was completely made up! (to that, even my manager himself agreed), plausibly to deflect from the systematic changes I was pushing. But it was a straw that started a lot. CS lead and my manager were best friends. > I was the only brown guy in the team and was constantly ignored from team events right from the day one. I am, ironically enough, highly extroverted and communicative and yet, I was excluded most of the time. 6/9 of the team members were the manager's own home country and university. He was openly racist and often remarked how he was surprised someone from my country could speak English so well and wondered why I was not working in IT. > He did not hold a 1:1 more than once in 5 months and was always busy. (Compared to another colleague of mine who joined at the same time, she was European fwiw) Ultimately, my probation period was not extended and I was devastated as I was on a visa. I asked him for the reason and he told me they were looking to hire someone more experienced...for a position that was titled Jr. Operations Manager and the job post explicitly said fresh grad/up to 2 years experience which I had. I thought of informing the HR but figured they are here to protect the company and not me - and would make some other random reason in this case to lay me off. I did persuade him to let me work 2 months extra to wrap up the project that I was overseeing to which he agreed. Project itself was completed in record time and to the stakeholder's praise. Note, I simultaneously worked on 4 different major projects at the same time - I used to work 12-14h a day (despite European labor laws), delivered to publicly high praise of country manager, and got booted. Also got to know I was paid 60% of what my other colleague was getting paid. I had left a 9-5 WLB, well-paid job in banking earlier because of the startup koolaid and this experience completely marred my view of that. It later on took me 9 months to find a job and that too in my home country. These series of events wrecked my confidence to an absolute low level. 3 years on, I have moved on, I'm at a much better firm in my home country and recouped a lot of my lost "self". Yet I am curious as to what you would have done in my shoes? How you would have navigated all this? #depression #mentalhealth #burnout #careeradvice