My personal, matter-of-fact story from a year of struggle, anxiety, and a painful 365 days of self-discovery.
I am writing this from my home office in Longview, Washington. Small town. Population around roughly 40,000. Not exactly what you picture when someone says Pentagon career. But here I am, a year out. Still looking. Still grinding. And finally ready to say out loud what this year has actually been.
The Exit
I spent nearly a decade inside the Department of Defense. First as a Digital Service Expert at Defense Digital Service. Then as the first Customer Experience Officer within the Chief Information Officer office. I served under the first Trump administration, the entire Biden administration, and the start of the second Trump administration. I loved the mission. I loved the people. I don’t say that to make the story sound better than it is. I say it because it matters for what comes next.
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When the deferred resignation program (DRP) rolled out, I thought about it seriously. The travel had been relentless. Close to ten years of splitting time between here and DC. And the return to office mandate had just dropped. I was not moving to DC. That was not a negotiation. So I told my team I was taking the DRP, had all the right conversations, let everyone know. It felt clean.
A week before my official leave date, I got an email. Turns out HQEs, Highly Qualified Experts in the executive band, were not eligible for the program. At will employees. Not covered, so they rescinded the offer.
I don’t know exactly who made that call or how far up it went. What I saw was an email with the unfortunate news. So I boxed up my government laptop, dropped my CAC in the mail back to the Pentagon, and that was that. DC was never going to happen.
The First Two Months
Everybody told me I would be fine.
I have a LinkedIn post somewhere from around that time that is genuinely optimistic. I wrote an op-ed for Defense Scoop. I had contract work lined up pretty quickly. Clients that needed help, things I could do from home, decent money coming in for those first few months.
I kept telling myself this was temporary. I kept not applying for unemployment because I could not square it in my head. There is no way I am going to be unemployed long enough for that to matter. That is what I thought.
But I was dead wrong about that.
What the Middle Actually Looks Like
By month three I was doing the thing everybody tells you to do. Three applications a day. Cover letters. Tailored resumes. LinkedIn messages to people I had not talked to in years. I would send something out and get an auto-response if I was lucky. More often I got nothing. Not even a rejection. Just silence.
I got far enough in a few processes to feel the thing starting to form, and then the silence would come back and I already knew what it meant.
Here is what I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect to feel the silence personally. I spent ten years building credibility inside one of the largest organizations on the planet. And now I am submitting to job boards and getting ghosted like everybody else. I am sitting in my home office, the same chair every day, and I am realizing that the title was doing more work than I understood while I had it.
I don’t know exactly when that hit me. There was not one moment. It accumulated.
The Budget
Christmas was tight. Birthdays were tight. The things my family had gotten used to, the things I had been able to provide without thinking about it, I was thinking about all of them.
My wife was working part time. I had been the breadwinner. That math does not just disappear because you tell yourself you will figure it out. It sits on the kitchen table. It shows up in the grocery store. It is in every conversation you have with yourself at 2am when you should be asleep.
I finally applied for unemployment in the fall. That was its own kind of reckoning.
The Part I Really Did Not See Coming
Somewhere in the middle of all of this I started noticing I couldn’t get things done the way I used to. The lists were building up. The ideas were piling on top of each other. I have always been a guy who does not sit still, always moving, always building something. But now I was stuck. Not depressed exactly. Just unable to execute in the way I expected myself to.
I scheduled a doctor’s appointment. I took a bunch of tests. I scored a 16 out of 18.
I was diagnosed with ADHD at 46 years old.
And I am thinking, how did I do what I did for this long without knowing this about myself. The answer, I think, is that structure did the work for me. A building. A badge. A calendar full of meetings. When all of that goes away and it is just you and your home office and your to-do list, the thing that was always there stops hiding.
Getting help has made a real difference. Structuring my days differently. Giving the noise a name.
Where It Sits Right Now
A year out. Still looking. Still in it.
There are conversations in progress. There are applications I sent three months ago and haven’t heard back on. There are days that are good and days that suck.
I’m not wrapping this up with a lesson. I don’t have one yet that feels honest. What I have is this: I made my daughter’s lunch this morning. I mowed the lawn on a regular basis. I recorded this. And I showed up.
If you are in this too, send me a message. Not because I have the answer. Just because you should know there is someone else sitting in their home office in a small town in Washington who is still in it with you.
Made with ❤️,
Savan