It’s been a long time my friends.
A long time since I’ve last posted anything here. A long time since I’ve sat down and looked at myself in the mirror. A long time since I wrote the first words in this blog. It’s been a long time on my journey to this moment.
I don’t have a good excuse for my absence, besides the ever-growing normalcy of my life. I’ve traded therapy days for work shifts, occupational therapy and making mandalas for lesson plans and dry-erase markers. I’ve worked longer than I have in a very long time, and I am enjoying what I am doing. I’m a teacher now, or, at the very least I’m teaching. My days are no longer filled with group meetings, psychiatrist check-ups, and sessions; they are filled with mundane realities of life. I am becoming a normal person, or at least I’m trying to play the role of one.
I still hear them, the voices in my head. I still wake up from nightmares not knowing what is real and what are the demons of my mind. I still have a threshold for how much I can mentally take, although I think it’s getting a little bigger every day. I can smile and joke again. I can make my students laugh. I can make my wife smile. I can hope and dream again; but that doesn’t mean any of the darkness has gone away.
I think about why I still have this desire, this compulsion, to write. I’ve been writing in analog, keeping things for myself; secrets I cannot share and things I do not want you to see. Still, I must reach out, I must bare my soul, I must have this place to let some of the weight off that drags around my neck.
I don’t want this to be a place where all I write about is my mental health, I don’t want to be that person anymore. I think people are tired of hearing about it, and I’m tired of living with it. I want to refocus, remember why I started this whole endeavor. This was supposed to be about my journey here in this holy land; but it just got a lot more complicated along the way.
I wanted to come up out of hiding today because it’s Memorial Day back in the states. A lot of things have happened that I should have written about before this, and maybe I still will; but I wanted to make sure that I took the time to say something today.
I come from a military family. My father was in, my grandfather, uncles, and even more as time goes back. I never took the oath, my dad wanted something different for me; but there are many times that I wish I had served and given something to my country, especially before I left her. There is something different about military service in America that I have come to appreciate living in a country with mandatory conscription. Here, you feel sorry for the men and women who would rather be doing something else with their lives, and are instead stuck in some job given to them just because they needed something to do. The number of actual combat soldiers is small, and the number of people who may have given more to the country with their youth doing something else is large.
That is what makes the idea of service in America so different. You’re not guaranteed honor or prestige, glory or combat; only a uniform and a job to do. You volunteer solely to serve, not knowing where you may end up. You could be a truck driver, a tank driver, a pilot, a grunt on the ground, a marine riding shotgun in a Humvee, or the next general-in-the-making. That choice is what binds the members of our armed services, the idea that as masters of our own fate, they decide to give part of their lives to their country.
Which brings us to today. Sometimes it’s not just a tour that you sacrifice, sometimes it’s your last breath, that last thing you will ever see; sometimes it’s everything. Sometimes its’s not just your sacrifice, but your parents’, your spouse’s, your family’s, your children’s. Today is not just about the people we lost, but the people they left behind. It’s about the people who get that knock on the door. It’s about the buddies who leave a poured beer untouched for a comrade. It’s about children who live in the shadow of sacrifice.
I don’t believe in the glories of war and conquest, but I believe in the beauty in heroism, in dedication, in gallantry, and in sacrifice. I’ve lived most of my life during various wars, and I live in a country now where war seems to always be on the horizon. I do not glorify death, but I find meaning in loss. War is hell, battles are horrible, but giving your life to protect your fellow soldiers and your country is tragically beautiful. So much of war is beyond any one person’s control, but the decision to serve with the dangers it comes with is entirely within our power. That choice, and the sometimes tragic consequences that come with it, is powerful and must be respected.
I do not want to glorify anything that has to with war. I wish we could live in peace with one another; but I am not a fool (just a madman). Every great nation is built on sacrifice, and it’s continued existence requires that more people die so that other’s may live freely. I pray that one day, this day will only be for remembrance, that no more stones will be carved with names of those lost, and that we will be able to look back and only thank those who gave everything so that people like me could write today.
May their memory be for a blessing, and may G-d watch over those that continue to serve in our armed forces.