June In Washington DC

Everything keeps happening

It’s difficult to articulate just how defeating it feels to be a young job seeker. Half of the job listings I come across are rife with typos, vague, or refuse to clearly list salaries which I’m pretty sure is illegal, and the other half indicate that I would be competing with hundreds if not thousands of other job seekers. In my attempts to excavate beyond the obvious causes of discomfort in the job hunt — “what if this is long-term?”, “what happens when my severance pay runs out?”, “how many other people are in this exact position?” — I realized that every job post I come across comes with the underlying reminder that I am ambitious and hungry and every aspect of the professional world feels designed to stifle the things that make me shine, the very parts of me that have gotten me anywhere in my career.

Last week I wrote an essay for my 28th birthday, entitled Complicated Feelings: Everything, in which I exclaimed, “Yes! I’m overwhelmed! Isn’t everyone?”. Overwhelm has been a common through-line in this newsletter and, indeed, in my life. Naturally, the world has kicked it up a couple of notches in the last week.

I began crafting and faltered over several themes this week in trying to parse through every topic I feel worth exploring. I want to write a 3rd installment of “Generative AI and Technofascism”; I want to write about political violence and the assassinations in Minnesota; I want to write about the No Kings protests, ICE, and the squeaky military parade; I want to write about the Middle East and Mutually Assured Destruction; I want to write about ethical frameworks and the things that make them work or collapse… I’m struggling to see past the bombast to write impactfully about anything this week.

My two-week post-layoff period of allowing myself to not worry has come to a violent end. Between my reemergence as an occasionally proud denizen of the “real world”, navigating access to unemployment benefits, COBRA, returning home on my birthday last week to another bill from the hospital for nearly ten thousand dollars, and the hamper full of clean laundry that I still have not folded, I am noxiously attuned to worry and its pervasive grip on modern American life. With all of that said, this week I’d like to share a poem that I wrote over the weekend:

Thank you for reading. If you found it worthwhile, please feel free to subscribe or share. As always, you can find me on Instagram and nowhere else on the Internet for now.

With Sincerity,

J.K.