3: Good Morning, Checking In

An All Expenses Paid Vacation to Purgatory

Good morning, checking in.

Message sent to my supervisor. Her response: a thumbs up.

This was the full extent of my professional interaction with my employer for the past... how many times now? 50? 100? It’s easy to lose count when the days start bleeding into each other the way they do.

I send it before 9am. She replies with a thumbs up to the message. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. No follow-up, no context, no insight into what is happening on the other side of whatever process has swallowed my career whole. Just a text and an emoji, arriving and departing like clockwork, a metronome keeping time over a year of my life where the typical daily rhythm has been replaced by lowscale, gnawing dread.

Two weeks later, a paycheck appears in my account. That’s my other connection to DHS. A text and a paycheck. Repeat until further notice.

People hear this and they don’t quite believe it. So you’re just... getting paid to do nothing? Yeah. Something like that. Except that’s not quite the right way to think about it, and I’ll get to that.

First, let me tell you how it started.

The harassment had been coming in waves since the video went viral. Messages, voicemails, LinkedIn notifications... a steady, disorienting flood of strangers who had decided, with remarkable confidence, exactly who I was and what I deserved. I had reported all of it; to my supervisors, to law enforcement, to anyone I thought might be able to do something about it.

I waited for some signal that the institution I had served for nearly a decade was going to meet me halfway.

The signal came that same evening.

But it wasn’t the one I was hoping for.

An email arrived, formal and brief, the kind of bureaucratic language that has been carefully drained of anything resembling human acknowledgment. I had been placed on administrative leave, effective immediately.

Not the next day. Not after a conversation. That night.

I sat with that for a while as my body refused to let sleep overtake me that evening.

---

The following morning I woke up and tried to log in. Everything was gone. Access, systems, email... all of it, locked overnight. A phone call from my supervisor came shortly after. They explained that they didn’t have any additional information for me aside from the email I had received about being put on administrative leave, except for the fact that I needed to return my government equipment immediately.

There were instructions to return all of my GFE (government furnished equipment), a deadline (which was “ASAP”), a process (meet your supervisor outside the office and give them your things). And then... nothing.

No explanation of what came next. No timeline. No sense of what I was supposed to do with myself while whatever machinery had been set in motion quietly churned away somewhere I couldn’t see.

I was still an employee of the Department of Homeland Security. I would continue receiving a paycheck every two weeks, government shutdowns notwithstanding. I had health insurance, technically a job title, theoretically a future with the federal government.

I just had absolutely no idea what any of that meant anymore.

So this is what administrative leave actually looks like from the inside.

You wake up. You make coffee. You get your kids ready for school and out the door. You send the text before 9am. You get a thumbs up in reply. And then you have the rest of the day stretched out in front of you. It sounds like freedom until you realize that freedom and limbo are not the same thing, and that the difference between the two is whether or not you know when it ends.

It doesn’t take long before the days develop their own strange texture. The ordinary stuff of life keeps happening, indifferent to the fact that your career is sitting in a holding pattern somewhere above an airport in a vessel you’re not allowed to contact. Life doesn’t stop just because your career is being held hostage.

During my time on administrative leave, my uncle and my grandmother passed away. My son discovered that Mario Kart can produce a level of existential rage disproportionate to it being a video game rated E for Everyone. Breakfasts got made, school drop-offs happened, grocery runs were completed. In other words, life continued to be life.

And underneath all of it, every single day, that low hum of dread. That background frequency you can’t ever completely tune out. Quietly and persistently asking: is today the day?

Is today the day the other shoe drops? Is today the day the process that has been churning invisibly somewhere inside the bureaucracy that houses my career finally produces a result? Is this the paycheck that doesn’t come? Is this the week someone calls with news?

Usually the answer was no. The paycheck came. The thumbs up arrived. The machinery kept churning. The false sense of security starts to lull in.

So you find things to do. You have to. I started studying Spanish in earnest in order to better communicate with my future in-laws. I also threw myself into learning everything I could about generative AI, which felt vaguely ironic given that I was an IT specialist with no IT work to do. I read. I worked out. I regularly met with my therapist and managed my anxiety with medication, again, after having thought I was done with anxiety meds barely a year before when my divorce had completed.

I traveled when I could. I tried to be present for my kids on the days I had them, which is harder than it sounds when part of your brain is permanently parked in a waiting room, waiting for the call.

There were genuinely good moments in there... dinners, trips, laughter, the ordinary texture of a life that refused to pause. And underneath all of it, always, there was that shadow. The awareness that any of it could be interrupted at any moment by a phone call or an email that I had no power over.

People would ask how I was doing and I would say fine, more or less, and often that was true. I was functional. I was managing. I was also, in a way that is difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it, completely stuck. Not dramatically. Not visibly. Just... stuck. Like happening to look at a broken wristwatch around lunchtime that was stuck at noon.

There was a moment, somewhere in the middle of all this, when something shifted. A change in my supervisor – in other words, the person I sent my text messages to each day – that brought with it a different energy; warmer, more human, the faint suggestion that someone on the other side of the process might actually be paying attention. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time. I filed it away.

It would matter later. But that’s a story for another piece.

Eventually, the check-in text became its own kind of anchor. Four words, sent before 9am, acknowledged with no more or less fanfare than a simple thumbs up emoji can offer.

It was absurd and it was also the only professional ritual I had left at the time, which meant it carried more weight than four words and an emoji have any right to carry.

Good morning, checking in.

Thumbs up.

See you tomorrow… maybe.