It’s been 6 months and 6 days since I stepped away from my job supporting the US Department of Energy, US Federal Highway Administration, US Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, and National Resources Canada where I helped build and document electric charging stations and alternative fuel stations around northern North America. When I left, the election hadn’t happened yet. Kamala Harris was 47 days into her campaign and people at work were confident in her presidency. I even had one of my bosses scoff at me when I mentioned that one of my reasons for leaving was the potential impact on our work from a Trump presidency. He insisted, “That’s never going to happen.”
It happened. One day shy of two months after I left my job supporting the Federal Government Trump won. Four and a half months after I left he took office, and since then I’ve watched from a distance as he’s demolished the work I spent decades building. It’s weird not being in the trenches with my old co-workers trying to salvage what we can.
I swear, if one more person asks me, “Aren’t you SOOOO GLAD you got out when you did?” I’m going to punch them. I’m sorry if it’s you, but I’m sick of it. I worked in public service because I believe in the importance of what the government does for it’s people. I built a team of smart, innovative, caring people who wanted to change the world and our country for the better. I left for a year, not because I wanted to be the first in the swamp drainage, but because I was tired and burned out from working and doing so much. My job consisted of managing 25 people with 30% of my time, and with the other 70% I supported a $16M portfolio, did business development, and managed five of my own projects where I was an individual contributor. I’m so fucking tired of hearing the bullshit about lazy government workers who do nothing. That was not my experience. I’m sick that my team and my projects are being demolished and I can’t help. But I also know that if I was still there, I’d probably be locked away in some padded room rocking slowly, because I was so far over capacity. I would have had no ability to continue working my ass off while the president and his cabinet destroyed our government.
Instead of having an insider’s perspective on the dismantling of the great experiment that was the United States of America’s constitutional division of power, I have been writing. I also left my job, because I had a dream I wanted to realize: to finish my novel. My first month I polished up a short fiction piece, that I love, called Bumblecat. I’m afraid it might never find a home because it’s been rejected five times since I started shopping it around, and it talks about the USDA, which may be dissolved any day. I wrote a second piece about becoming the United States Egg Czar. That one is quite funny, and was also rejected. (But the rejection said it was funny, so I know it is actually funny.) It’s going up on the blog this weekend, because it’s a timely piece and I don’t want it to expire. I hope you like it. The third piece, which will go up on my blog next week is a gut wrencher of a piece about my cat who died in November of 2024. It was also rejected and since it is outside of my normal satire and speculative fiction space and I’m not in the mood to research a bunch of new markets to reject me.
Rejection is my life’s theme right now. My daughter just got cut from the club basketball team she’s been playing on for 4 years, for her senior season. I’ve had 7 writing rejections in 2025. As a country, we are rejecting the values that I hold dear. Honestly, I feel like I exist in a universe that has no room for me.
Thank goodness I’m creating a whole new universe where I can escape. While I’m woefully behind where I’d like to be in my book, I really like it. The people are fascinating and their struggles are meaningful. When I left in September, I expected to have the manuscript done and ready to start shipping to agents by the end of this month. Ha ha. Turns out creative pursuits do not work like technical projects. I can’t lay out a Gantt chart filled with deliverables, milestones, and deadlines and make something like a novel happen. Thankfully after about 3 months of forcing myself to a schedule, I modified my approach and now have half of a book done. I’ve got a plan for the final half all written out with colorful pens on sticky notes stuck to a cardboard thing you’d use at a science fair. I know where I’m going and I’m excited about the direction. I’ve also got book 2 pretty solidified in my head, and book 3 keeps popping in to say “hello.”
The plan was to give this writing thing a year, and then go back to work. But right now, I don’t think there will be work to go back to. My expertise in electric cars and electric car charging has limited value in our country. My 20 years of experience working across the Federal Government is meaningless once the departments I know are dissolved. And everything I write gets rejected, so even if I get this book done, it’s unlikely to ever find a home. All I can do on a daily basis is kick all those worries down the road for future Johanna. Present Johanna still has 6 months of freedom to finish her dream of writing a book, and I try to push away the fear and worry to focus on creating a new world that doesn’t suck as much as this one. Hopefully you’ll get to read about it someday.
Afthead 