Post Pardon Depression

There's Nothing Better Than Freedom But Life After Prison Comes With Its Own Challenges

[Welcome back gentle readers. This piece is more experiential than my other work and reveals something of the experience of being a J6er and life after incarceration. If you would like to read more like this, please let me know in the comments.]

I've had many jobs throughout my adult life: teacher, journalist, sailor, translator, spook, analyst, researcher, and, of course, inmate.

But I don't think of them as separate vocations. Rather, I prefer to think of them as individual projects for my one real job. Which is being me. So no matter what I'm doing, I'm always at the same company. You can call it Matt's Life Co.

The funny thing is, however, is that my place in this fictional workplace isn't at the top of the food chain. This even though Matt's Life Co is all about me. I'm not the CEO. That's a position held by my ultimate boss, God. To my mind, my position doesn't even qualify as the c-suite.

No, I'm one of the nameless faceless drones hammering away at some keyboard in the bowels of some windowless room. Just one more office worker in some fantastic room of cubicles that stretch out into infinity.

Welcome to Matt's Life Co. What product or service we provide is not at all that clear and what exactly we're doing is something of mystery to me. All I know is that I've worked very hard at it and for a very long time.

One of the projects I'd like to briefly touch on is the time I volunteered for submarine duty in the Navy.

I signed up shortly after I got married, which is relevant. These missions involved operating at sea for months at a time and without the ability to communicate directly to my wife at home. Only with rare exceptions were we even allowed to give a heads up that we were returning home.

From talking to my fellow surface riders, it was a completely different situation. Surface vessels have luxuries like constant email contact and even telephones. Not to mention access to things like the sky and fresh air.

How very continental.

During those extended periods of isolation and blacked-out communications, I had to learn to trust my wife with something I never wanted to relinquish control of: our personal finances.

The truth is I never really liked managing the finances. Paying the bills was an especially annoying and time consuming task. So I wasn't really annoyed when I realized she would happily take on that responsibility.

By the end of my submarine tour, she had total control of our bills and banking. I could never muster the sufficient concern to involve myself in all that hassle.

It's remained that way ever since even though I separated from the Navy 11 years ago and no longer face the threat of being thrown onto another WestPac.

In a way, the arrangement born out of this hardship prepared us for the eventuality in 2023 when, after a show trial in the DC federal district, I found myself incarcerated.

Once again, we were completely shut off from each other. I could write. And we could talk for about 15 minutes a day most of the time. But it would be 17 whole months before we could ever meet face to face through prison visitation.

That's a story perhaps for another day.

I mention this because it shows how hardship doesn't just sharpen the mind and build character, but at times you can see how God subjects you to one hardship to prepare you for another.

It's as if my CEO, God, is one of those annoying manager types who rewards success with yet another impossible task.

I imagine God's head peering over my cubicle wall as I work at Matt's Life Co, "Hey you did really well on that whole arduous submarine duty thing, so we're putting you for the Political Prisoner Project."

"Thanks?" I responded in a tone indicating that I do not all want what God is proposing.

I was sent to the DC gulag, where I languished unnecessarily for 9 months before I was transferred eventually to Beaumont FCI.

Beaumont for me was a low security federal facility. And that meant living with a degree of latitude that prisoners in medium or penitentiary level facilities could only dream of.

That experience taught me that there's no such thing as a little bit of freedom. Being allowed to walk the yard or go to the library or go to Tuesday mass was great. But never enough. In a way, being able to walk the yard and stand in a grassy field was a kind of exquisite torture. I knew that just four hours away my from own wife who was living her solitary life under that very same big Texas sky.

So when we were pardoned on January 20th 2025, it was without a doubt the happiest day of my life. I had my freedom back. Not only that, but my felon status was erased. I was free. Free to return home and wrap my arms around my wife once more. Free to live in our home. And to once more go outside whenever I wanted and shop and buy the things I needed and fix stuff and write and eat and sleep and all those things that were impossible to do in prison.

It's been seven weeks since that day of liberation. It's been glorious. And it's also been very, very difficult.

It's not an easy thing to be away for a year and a half and just reinsert yourself into life in an attempt to pick up where you left off. This realization comes slowly, because the process of returning is extremely triumphant and gratifying.

The first thing I did when I got home was to replace all the burnt out light bulbs, change all the batteries in the smoke detectors, and fix the clothes dryer.

Imagine coming home and everything is dark and there's a flashlight next to the door so my wife could navigate the home at night. Clothes are strung up on drying racks and every few minutes one of a handful of smoke detectors would beep. That's the life that the Department of Justice sentenced my wife to when they threw me into the clink.

I was happy to fix those things. That one big injustice of the J6 prosecutions meant there were a lot of little wrongs to right.

But then I realized that the problems kept popping up. Right now, I can't fix half of them. I no longer have the fancy $75K job I had before Lone Star Analysis fired me back in 2021.

Last weekend, the frustration built to a crescendo and I ended up venting about it to my wife. Our one working car is in need of over a thousand dollars in repairs. Our back door is literally rotting away. All throughout the home, electric circuits are failing for no reason that I can discern. Our floors need replacing. We have a broken dishwasher that's been repurposed as a fancy dish drying rack. There are two vehicles that haven't moved in years and I'm not even sure what exactly is wrong with either of them. Neither myself or my wife has been to dentist or eye doctor, (or any other kind of doctor come to think of it) in almost five years and we're both over 50.

We've been holding on for the past few years, burning through every last bit of savings to pay for legal fees, related expenses, and the occasional emergency like a ruined transmission. We had a cushion. We don't now.

I have a home. Four walls and a roof. But only just. I may have returned home just in time to watch it fall into ruin. It's a scenario that keeps me up at night. Admittedly that's a step up from the screaming that kept me up in prison, but hey sleep deprivation is sleep deprivation.

At the end of the day, I'm in a much better position than many of my cohorts who are in fact homeless or abandoned by their families. I wouldn't be here now were it not for the generosity of my awesome clients and some personal friends. I know from having been locked up in the DC Patriot Pod for nine months that my situation is better than many of those I was incarcerated with.

So I suspect that among the J6ers, I am not alone in my anger, sadness, and frustration.

At the same time, I feel I have no right to these feelings. So I'm wracked with gloom over my situation as well as guilt for even indulging in these feelings.

The other day I opened a spreadsheet related to some work I am doing. Thanks to the Biden regime, I'll never be able to go back to my previous career as a market analyst for federal contractors. So I'm putting my skills to work in various other jobs with new clients.

I've always been damn good with data, consolidating it from various open sources, getting it on a spread sheet, setting the proper formatting, and then turning it into a solid product for all kinds of analysis. Sorted columns, pivot tables, charts and graphs -- all second nature to me. At one point in my life, I dreamt in cells and rows and columns. I don't mind telling you, my spreadsheets were things of beauty.

I'm giving myself license to brag because that's all in the past. And it's no longer true.

I spent hours on that work-related spreadsheet. It had some major formatting flaws in the way the data was entered and I wanted to clear that up. Well, I couldn't. I went back and forth, trying my best to fix what I thought was broken. Nothing worked. I looked for help online. Nothing worked. I kept wracking my brain trying to understand what was wrong. I even asked AI for help.

And. Nothing. Worked.

My chest tightened and my breath became shallow. My pulse raced and my hands shook. It couldn't be true. Something so simple and I wasn't any better than someone who had never seen a spreadsheet before in their life. It couldn't be true. I tried to calm myself.

I closed my eyes and tried to allow my hands to do their work. There was something, a trick, I was forgetting. I felt it. There was something in my muscle memory trying to force its way to the surface. So I waited, hoping my hands would remember what to do. My mind was blank.

And my hands, completely still. There was no memory left.

I couldn't accept it. How could I forget something I had devoted two decades of my adult life to? I kept bashing at that spreadsheet. Formulas floated out of the deepest reaches of my memory. Tricks in advanced pasting and format conversion started to slowly trickle in. But none of them were what I knew I needed to complete the task. Over an hour later, I was out of ideas. And still nowhere. Not even a single step closer to my goal.

I gave up. I closed without saving, my eyes wide with disbelief. How could I know that I knew something and yet not know exactly what that something was?

How could I be alienated from ... myself? My own memories?

It's called atrophy -- the loss of ability, knowledge, or skill due to lack of use. It's not a new concept for me. Government linguists are required to take language classes in order to maintain their global language skills to prevent atrophy from wearing down fluency. It can happen to any language, even your mother tongue, if you go long enough without using it.

So that's what is happening to me. There was no opportunity to use computers in prison. You can't do things like create presentations or spreadsheets. In fact prison is probably the last place in the world where all clerical work is still done by typewriter. If you want to make a chart, you better have a pen and paper.

Prison takes more than time and freedom from you. It deprives you of your place in life. You don't get out of prison and just go right back to what you were before. You lose your job, your source of income, and now it's become clear to me that you even lose your skills. The process changes in you profound and unexpected ways even going so far as to rob you of abilities and knowledge.

Depression over a spreadsheet. It's a scene right out of some office comedy. But I had plans for when I got out. Suffice it to say, those plans aren't working out as smoothly as I had hoped.

Reinventing who you are and what you do at any time in your life is no easy task. When you're over 50 and coming from a life of incarceration, that process of reinventing yourself feels daunting. Even insurmountable.

I not only don't have the money to fix the problems I face, I find myself lacking the very skills I intended to utilize in turning my life around after prison. Now I can either resign myself to the fact that I've lost those skills, or set myself to the process of trying to relearn them.

Whatever I do, I can't dawdle. There is no time. The responsibility weighing on me is admittedly heavy. I'm not just starting over. I'm doing it with one hand tied behind my back. It's yet another in a series of difficulties I've had to take on. So I wipe my tears that I may take on this challenge clear-eyed.

I suppose this is yet another of those moments when I'm hard at work in the office of Matt's Life Co only to see a familiar set of eyes poking over the cubicle wall.

God: "Yeah... You did great on that Political Prisoner Project," he strolled into my cubicle and playfully nudged my shoulder with the hand not holding the coffee in a paper cup. "So now we think you're a good fit for the Total Reinvention Initiative." He smiled, but it's less out of happiness and more out of anticipation for my expected reaction.

"Great," I say, rolling my eyes. "Hey. Are you ever going to, I don't know, let up a little? I mean does it have to be one big challenge after another?"

"You know it!" God shrugged his shoulders at my suggestion. "Of course it's nothing but one big challenge after another! That's life!"

"No. I don't think so. I've been asking around at other people's life cos and I'm pretty certain that others don't have it this bad. You say it's life, but what I'm hearing is that it's my life."

"That's what I meant. It's your life. It's what you do."

"Well, could I not?"

God looked into the distance as if contemplating an answer when he was really letting my question hang long enough for me to regret asking it. "Sure. You can put in a request," he leveled a meaningful gaze into my eyes, "but frankly I don't think you'd like the alternative. Besides ..."

"Besides?"

"You're the only man for the job."

I gave a resigned smirk. "I suppose that's true."

"Atta trooper." He points at me with his coffee hand, turns, and walks away.

I sigh. And get to work.

Matt da Silva once worked at the highest levels of government trust as a Japanese and Mandarin Navy linguist. In addition to working at the tip of the intel spear, he also has the distinction of having served 18 months in federal prison for his involvement in Jan 6. Now he's pardoned and using his intel analysis and writing skills in defense of the 21st century civil rights movement known as America First. You can find more of his writings at his substack (which is free). You may also want to give him a follow on X and TruthSocial. Please subscribe!