He was a smartass, but also very blunt - unsparingly.

I did not encourage him to, this was just during a weekly 1:1 where I was sharing with him how I’ve been coping with the amount of workload and chaos happening among the team/myself.

He was wanting to empathize me that it’s not normal to have to do that to be functional at work, acknowledging how rough things were at the time.

I kept doing it, but fell out of practice. Also left and no longer work there, due to stress and poor support. Shocker.