My Biggest Heartbreak Thus Far

For as long as I can remember, my ambition was clear:

to work in government, or at least to shape public policy in a meaningful way.

Not through the civil service track, but through donor institutions, policy consultancies, and NGOs—spaces that felt adjacent to power yet anchored in expertise. Indonesia, after all, is still a developing country. These pathways made sense.

I pursued that career for almost a decade.

Like many people who take this path, I carried a quiet, almost embarrassing hope:

that if I became competent enough—exceptionally competent—one day I might be invited inside government itself. Perhaps as a minister, a director general, or a presidential adviser.

I grew up watching technocrats I deeply admired—figures who embodied rigor, integrity, and seriousness. I even had the chance to meet some of them, to see that principled people could exist within the state.

That belief sustained me for years.

Then I turned thirty.

Gibran, the president’s son, became a vice-presidential candidate by bending Constitutional Court rules.

I woke up one morning in a small rented room in Whitechapel to the news that Prabowo and Gibran had been inaugurated as president and vice president.

It felt less like political disappointment, and more like personal heartbreak.

Since then, it has been difficult to look away:

• tens of trillions of rupiah in public funds poured into a free lunch program, food left uneaten, children falling ill;
• young people pushed into precarious gig work, one of them killed after being run over by police during a protest;
• disasters in Aceh and Sumatra met with indifference, with no serious recovery effort in sight;
• and countless other moments I no longer try to catalogue, because remembering them feels physically exhausting.

The dream I had chased for so long—

collapsed.

Not because it was unrealistic.

But because the rules changed while pretending they never had.

Beyond good faith. Beyond repair.

And with that realization came a quieter, more dangerous question:

why bother trying at all?

I am still working in NGOs. I still do policy consulting, hoping—perhaps stubbornly—that the work still matters.

But increasingly, my attention has turned inward.

Toward repairing what I can in my own life.

Because who will save us, if not ourselves?

I am reminded of a conversation with my mother about Jakarta’s sidewalks. She once told me she would pray that I could afford a car, so I would not have to walk on unsafe pavements.

I asked her to revise the prayer.

This was never about me.

It was about millions of people who deserve to walk safely in the city they inhabit.

Maybe that was naïve.

Or maybe it was simply what it meant to believe—once—that the state could be something more than a mechanism for preserving power.

Today, I feel untethered.

I no longer know what my north star is.

But perhaps this confusion is not a personal failure.

Perhaps it is the natural aftermath of heartbreak.

When something you believed in turns out to be structurally uninterested in you—

in your competence, your integrity, your patience.

What remains is not clarity, but reckoning.

And for now, I am still sitting with it.