Love as a Practice: A Love Letter to My Friends & Colleagues

Jermaine Fowler wrote beautifully about love as a practice in his piece, How Far Would You Walk? (If you haven’t read it, please do. And if you don’t currently follow Jermaine, please do that, too.)

In thinking about love as a practice, it was in this spirit that I wrote the following letter to my current and former friends and colleagues who work in or adjacent to the federal government.

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It’s mid-February, and I am writing from my own place of navigation and remembering, aware of how the grief of the harms of 2025 can return when they were never fully acknowledged or repaired.

Many of you have written to or spoken with me in recent weeks and months, anticipating this moment. Some of you have used the words "burnout" and "activated". Some have said you are full of rage or still feel unsettled without quite knowing why it has lingered. Others have shared that the news cycle has been difficult to watch and that the tone and posture of certain public figures have brought back a familiar feeling in their bodies. A few of you have mentioned that you are approaching the one-year mark since being pushed out, dismissed, or otherwise displaced from federal-level work you believed in. I want to write to you directly and gently because what I am hearing is not confusion. It is recognition.

There are moments in public life when events take on a symbolic weight that far exceeds the immediate facts. When we witness leaders respond to scrutiny with denial, attack, or strategic inversion of responsibility, something in many of us tightens. For those who have experienced institutional betrayal, these moments do not register as distant or abstract. They can feel eerily familiar—the tone, the choreography, the refusal to pause, the absence of visible moral friction. Even if the context is different, the pattern can feel the same. For those who have lived within systems that minimize, redirect, or reframe harm, watching these dynamics play out at scale can stir the body in ways difficult to explain to others.

If you are noticing this in yourself, I want to make it clear that you are not overreacting. You are remembering.

Institutional betrayal is not a single event. It is a process. It occurs when the structures that are meant to protect, support, and uphold shared values instead deny harm, displace accountability, or render people disposable. When it happens, it disrupts more than employment. It disrupts identity, meaning, and belonging. Many of you entered public service with a deep sense of moral commitment. You believed in the work. You believed in the mission. You believed that systems could be shaped toward care, equity, and repair. To be pushed out of those spaces, or to watch them change in ways that felt unrecognizable, is not simply a professional loss. It is a moral and relational rupture.

As anniversaries approach, it is common for the body to mark time even when the mind tries to move forward. You may notice shifts in mood, sleep, concentration, or energy. You may find yourself revisiting conversations, replaying decisions, or trying again to make sense of what happened. You may feel anger, grief, relief, or a complicated mix of all three. None of this means you are stuck. It means that a part of you is still integrating an experience that mattered to you.

In trauma research and in the study of moral injury, there is a consistent finding that healing is closely tied to meaning-making. People recover not by forgetting, but by finding a way to place the experience into a larger narrative that honors what was lost while preserving what was true. For many of you, the work you did still matters. The values that led you there still matter. The relationships you built still matter. Being pushed out does not invalidate the integrity with which you showed up. If anything, the fact that so many of you struggled within those environments often reflected your moral clarity, not your failure.

There is another dimension to this that is harder to name. When institutions respond to harm by denying, attacking, or reframing the narrative, it can create a subtle form of disorientation. You may find yourself questioning your memory, your judgment, or your interpretation of events. You may wonder whether you misunderstood something or whether you should have handled things differently. This kind of self-interrogation is a common response to environments where accountability is avoided and responsibility is deflected. It is an understandable attempt to regain a sense of coherence. I want to remind you that your experience deserves to be taken seriously. Your perception is not the problem that needs fixing.

One of the most protective forces in the aftermath of institutional betrayal is collective sense-making. Healing does not happen only in private. It happens in conversation, in the quiet exchange of recognition between people who lived through the same conditions, and in the gradual reconstruction of shared reality. Many of you have already been doing this work. You have reached out to one another. You have compared notes. You have named patterns that once felt confusing. In doing so, you have helped restore something that was fractured. You have helped each other regain trust in your own perceptions.

It is also important to say that repair does not require reconciliation with the system that caused harm. There is a quiet pressure in professional culture to frame difficult exits as growth experiences, to emphasize resilience, or to move quickly toward the next opportunity. For some, that framing can feel premature or even dismissive. You are allowed to grieve what was lost. You are allowed to feel anger about what should have been different. You are allowed to hold a complicated relationship with the institutions you once believed in. None of this diminishes your professionalism or your strength. It reflects your humanity.

Over time, many people find that what returns first is not trust in systems, but trust in their own discernment. You begin to notice that your instincts are sharper. You recognize early signs of environments that are misaligned with your values. You choose more carefully where to invest your energy. This is not cynicism. It is a form of wisdom that emerges from lived experience. It allows you to rebuild a sense of agency that may have been compromised.

If you are approaching an anniversary and finding yourself unsettled, consider marking the moment in a way that feels grounding. You might write down what you know now that you did not know then. You might reflect on what you carried with you and what you chose to leave behind. You might reach out to someone who shared that chapter with you and acknowledge the date. These small acts can help transform a moment of activation into a moment of integration.

I also want to acknowledge something more hopeful. Many of you are still here. You are still practicing, still building, still caring, still finding ways to contribute. You did not leave your values behind. You carried them forward into new spaces. The systems may have shifted, and some doors may have closed, but the commitment that brought you into public service remains part of who you are. That continuity matters.

In times when public life feels particularly charged, it can help to remember that you are not alone in what you are sensing. The reactions you are having are common among those who have experienced similar conditions. There is a quiet network of people across the country who are doing the slow work of rebuilding after rupture. You are part of that network, whether you see it or not.

If the past few weeks have felt heavy, I hope you can offer yourself a measure of gentleness. If memories are surfacing, let them be vital information, not something you have to fight. If the anniversary of your departure brings up emotion, let it mark the distance you have traveled as well as the cost of what happened. Healing does not mean that nothing ever hurts again. It means the experience gradually finds its place in the story of your life, rather than remaining at its center.

I am thinking of you. I am thinking about all of us. I hold respect for what you gave, what you endured, and what you still carry. And I am hopeful, quietly and steadily, that the work many of you continue to do will help shape systems that are more accountable, more humane, and more capable of care than the ones that hurt you.
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My name is Rachael Dietkus, and I work with educators, public interest designers, civic tech teams, and system builders to move from trauma-aware to trauma-responsive practice. You can learn more about my work at Social Workers Who Design.