Aftermath

In private life

The other side is good, says the Visitor.

There is tranquility in distance from the minute-by-minute barrage of heinous provocations whistling down from the skies. I wasn’t sure if simply stepping over the line between federal employment and unemployment would in fact create any of that distance. I’m still at the mercy of my social feeds, after all, and I’m still in the capital, still dependent on volleying developments and counter-developments for the raw materials of small talk. But there is distance. The categorical shift is real. Not all — or even most — of our prevailing nightmares directly touched my work or my place of employment, so it’s not like I had a professional obligation to be driven half-insane by all the sadism and stupidity, but wherever you are in the federal government, there’s the sense of something looming and inchoate always casting its heavy shadow on you from the Oval Office. We are in the hive, and the hive is always buzzing. We are chemically attuned to the queen. At least it’s always felt that way to me.

I’m understanding the other side of all my text message chains with friends outside the government over the course of the Trump era. For days, we would furiously comment on whatever just happened, matching our passions to a mutual inflamed pitch, as the grievous insults to our intelligence piled up. Then there would come a lull, a key change. I imagined those friends’ private lives pulling to the front of the peloton. A private life I didn’t have. An airlock inaccessible to me. I’d let them drift into that untroubled sphere, where there’s a glass of wine on the counter and a beurre blanc in the saucepan, and brace myself for a period of lonesome struggle with my own shock and anger.

That part of my life is over.

In these first couple of weeks at home, the task has been in some ways undertaking the process of acknowledging that. We’re not good at admitting finality in the United States. We’re unwaveringly loyal to our symbols — the flattering ones anyway — even in their obsolescence, like wooden baseball bats. “We are a nation of laws.” Uh-huh. I saw Elvis at Denny’s. We are always dying; never dead. In 100 years, we’ll all be walking around in AI spacesuits with built-in nuclear reactors, and we will still be singing dirges for the fading (but not entirely faded) heyday of the Great American Coal-Mining Lifestyle. Part of this certainly has to do with the fact that the glorified telemarketers who babysit all of our politicians understand that “help us save democracy” generates a great many more small-dollar donations than “help us survive the post-democracy ordeal.” Maybe our reluctance to affirm an ending goes deeper than that kind of motivated information manipulation. Maybe it doesn’t. A lot of things that used to seem like deep undercurrents of our national character have turned out to be fickler than that, more manipulable.

Our patriotism, real or manufactured, was not built over years of countless pledges of allegiance to admit the passing into history of due process and equal protection, so we insist these things must be forever only on the verge of going away. But things end. Things end all the time. What is it the older parents keep telling me? There is a final time you carry your child. Countries that purge their civil service are rarely the same country afterward. We’re not all just getting hired back soon. Once every rigorously delineated database of personal information that distinct government agencies collected from us merges into one database, controlled by unknown parties, it does not unmerge. Once the legislature dissolves, either by force or by indifference, it does not spontaneously reassemble.

We should do what France does and number our republics. At least that would memorialize the severity of the breach.

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I should be focusing on getting the job search up and running.

I’m one of those people who is forever certain that I’m doing just ever-so-slightly less than what I should be. Writing not enough cover letters. Making not enough revisions to my resume for a specific vacancy. I accept that it is good and healthy to take some time for rest and reflection. But for me that just means I’m certain I have done not enough rest and reflection.

I feel great about leaving the haunted carnival, but also bad about feeling great.

Construction site, Washington, D.C., 2025

I’ve talked to some other federal employees who decided to leave through the door they were shown, and there’s real ambivalence there. It feels almost like shame. It’s to some degree the unthinkability of the American taxpayer bankrolling our idleness for several months and not hearing Virginia Foxx raining hellfire down upon us. But that’s a them problem. Let them wrestle with the ease with which they abandoned their principles — even if they were only show principles, even if they were only an extremely shouty bit. If I’d committed my whole career to a bit like that, I’d still flinch a little at dropping it. They don’t. They seem fine with it. The group chat told them to be.

We were smeared for serving the administrative state, and now there is at least a passing sense of being smeared for leaving it. As if we’ve taken a bribe to abandon our posts. Drugged like King Duncan’s bedroom guards with free money. Of course we can recognize this as the heightened defensiveness common in a crisis and move past it, but it remains a part of the matrix of sensations characterizing this transition. In the aftermath of our denunciation, we recognize all the forms of conditioning that we didn’t register when they were happening, and a kind of mild process of disalienation becomes necessary. It was just a job at first. Maybe even a little bit of a disappointing job. Then stuff accumulated, stuff that fused with identity, stuff that echoed the powerful stories that constitute identity, especially if you were raised to revere your country. Every interminable ethics or security training retold those stories, mostly in the tritest of ways, but we heard them; we heard them again and again.

Certain job opportunities show promise, more of them than I expected would be available back in late January and early February, when it started dawning on us that the job-killing was going to extend far past the edges of the executive branch, into foreign assistance firms, into cultural institutions, into medical research. The market is tight, but it’s not completely closed. Yet I find myself shying away from all those jobs that are simply slight variations on the one I just left — i.e., the ones I’m qualified for. I have a hunger for reinvention, whether that’s realistic or not.

This rejection of what should be the natural next career move is related to these tensions around recognizing Last Things. Let me not obstinately tend a flame that’s burned out. I’m probably the one being unreasonable. These collective illusions of reversibility are useful, like the ones that the eye and brain together fabricate out of the disorganized signals of the actual world. I should go along with the illusion, but this short extension of my government salary indulges me, at least for a few weeks, in my refusal to accept the utility of doing anything like what I used to do. I gave a lot of years to an entity and a way of life that is being used to hurt people, badly. Our contract with the state, when it is not being ignored, is being refitted as a trap for the vulnerable. I don’t trust anything that resembles it.

I’m trying to get involved in a local activist organization. I’m trying to replace the brick pavers on my patio. I went to a Wednesday afternoon Nationals-Guardians game by myself. We bought my daughter a butterfly kit for her 5th birthday, and we watched tiny caterpillars grow, change into something new and fly away.

I wake up each morning about ten minutes later than I did three weeks ago, when I was going to the office. Those ten minutes are reliably saturated with dreams. I don’t remember what happens in them. I think I’m dreaming about still dreaming. The dreams are trying to account for the fact that I’m still asleep. Each passing minute testifies to disorder, and the dream is grasping at known categories in which to place these testimonies, to impose sense on this abrupt departure from long-established patterns. There are drilling rigs for geothermal wells outside the window of my bedroom, part of the reconstruction of the elementary school on our block. During these dreams, the rigs are already filling the room with their deep abrasive drone and clatter. I’ve been transferred to another hive. It takes me a few seconds after sitting up to become aware of hearing it. Then I begin.