The Axe

It was Friday morning.  Fridays were always a blessing because it meant we had made it through another week, I generally had a bit of a break on the weekends compared to the commitments and work during the week and had more time and energy to be of support to Travis.

Friday mornings meant we had made it to the goal line for one week, it proved we had another week of challenges, pain, and difficulty behind us, and we were one week closer to sentencing and moving beyond this chaos.

Friday, June 17^th meant a phone call from Travis’s employer.  A call we had been hoping, wishing, and praying would never come yet a call we could understand receiving.  Even though they had ensured Travis when this situation began they would stand behind him and keep him onboard, that certainty had seemed to waver this week with the press release being the icing on the cake.

Travis was fired from his job.  With his job went what remained of his purpose, his ability to provide for his family, our financial security, and his self-worth.  Travis was grateful and gracious for having the opportunity to be a part of the company for the few short months he was there.  He was deeply thankful for the relationships he had built there with some incredible coworkers.  Yet again we experienced being told one thing and then having the opposite occur.  The repeated blindsiding was starting to really take its toll.

However, the Travis I was seeing through this entire situation was a Travis who was placid.  He was absolutely anxious, panicked, flabbergasted, and devastated, but he was never angry, hostile, unpredictable, violent, or aggressive.  If there was ever a time to expect to see some of the behavior creep out of someone who had committed this type of crime, it was now…during the most stressful and trying circumstances he faced.

Yet what persisted day in and day out was a deliberate and mindful individual assuaging the difficulty in this situation as best he could.  Back in February when the investigation began and I was in the biased mindset he had clearly done something to have the FBI show up at our house, I told Travis if he dealt with whatever was at the root of the issue creating this situation, I would stay with him.  We all make mistakes in life and it’s whether or not we learn from our mistakes that matter to me.  I had created a safe space for him to fully express himself, to live his true identity, and deal with life however he needed.  And I was seeing his true nature was a patient, mindful, and thoughtful individual.

The pieces of this puzzle continued to not add up.

Nevertheless, it was Friday, and Travis no longer had a job.  I had been planning to submit my two weeks notice to resign from the Department of Homeland Security on Monday.  Not anymore.  This dream of mine to jump into my business full time was now being placed on the backburner.  My motivation was the lowest it had ever been to work for an entity that was treating people as I was witnessing with Travis, yet my most important desire was to provide for my family.  The easiest way to do so was to continue the employment I’d known for nearly a decade and have the ensured paycheck.

I compartmentalized all of the feelings–and there were many of them–this situation dredged up with earning a paycheck from an organization where I was completely out of moral alignment.  I did not dissociate from these feelings, and I would address all of them come October.  But for now, we needed to survive with the least amount of grind and difficulty possible until Travis could secure new employment.  In the weeks to come Travis did work diligently to find new employment, but no one was willing to hire him while he was in the middle of this legal situation.  

The next night, on Saturday, we had tickets front and center to watch Bon Iver perform.  With both of us working very long hours for several years we very infrequently had taken time away from the routine of adulting to spoil ourselves.  But now with this situation, it didn’t feel like the spoiling or the celebration it was meant to be when we purchased the tickets.

Travis was concerned about running into people who would recognize him since the news had been so extensive with covering his case and considered not even going.  We knew we would not be enjoying these types of luxuries in life for some time to come as he was facing serving time in prison.  The concert was a bittersweet combination of being incredible—Bon Iver is so talented—and being painful.  Tears leaked from my eyes throughout most of the concert.  The grieving for our old life was only really beginning.  There was no going back.  There was only going forward, and to go forward meant to go through every single step of this hardship.

There is a peculiar thing about seeing things:  once you see them you can’t un-see them.  Once you call your attention to a topic you begin to see more and more of it all around you.  I was seeing the injustice of justice and try as I may I could not un-see it.  And the next massively inconsistent regulation of social media threats was less than a week away.

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Peace & Love,

Janessa