I hit a ten-year milestone this month. Ten years of writing. Unpaid, but writing somewhat consistently nonetheless. (I try to keep up with this blog about once a month. I write in other spaces on a daily and weekly basis.)

I am not the same person I was then, much like I wasn’t the same person at the end of my enlistment with the Marine Corps compared to when I started.

Growth happens. If we allow it to occur. And, surprisingly, not everyone wants to grow professionally, personally, for practical reasons. Staying where you are is comforting. You know the routine. Knowing what’s around the corner because you’ve looped it several times before brings with it the perception of security. I say perception because if nothing else, the years have taught me nothing is guaranteed.

My blog was built on the idea of talking about other women’s service. Not mine. I’m quite the introvert naturally, and I thought just wanting other women to open up about their experiences and coming across them in spaces I already frequented would build the trajectory of this blog. Being mostly unwilling to get out of my comfort zone could have torpedoed this blog. My discomfort in reaching out to strangers did factor into why the blog never expanded into a landing space for other people’s stories (at least not from their perspective). I tested out the waters then for sharing my own experiences, and I’m glad I did.

It was a lesson that sometimes failing in one regard is the best thing that can happen to us.

My blog became a full circle unpacking of my Marine Corps experiences. I’ve edited it very little. There are some current events that have encouraged me to prioritize personal safety, so my full name is no longer reflected on here. Taking a page from a number of male authors who’ve talked about their own military service, it is ok to limit the scope of the conversation and one’s personal life. Some details matter, and some are background noise. We all have characters that pass through our lives that don’t need a continual mention. Then there are people whose legacy deserves to live on. We don’t realize their impact maybe in the first or second interaction we have with them, but their role in our lives completely changes who we become. I became a Marine, because I wanted to serve in a friend’s place after his death. I had no deep desire to serve other than to pay respects to his memory. With no real planning, I joined and belonged to a subpopulation of the United States for four years. Those four years continue to influence my life greatly. They are not everything that I am though.

We must be bold as veterans though to accept we are more than the uniform and the amount of time we committed to our respective service branch(es). Some veterans will stay in that loop, feeling that their military service is the best thing they’ve ever done, the best moments they’ll ever live. I feel a little sad that they don’t see their full potential. We may have had some great days, unforgettable life changing moments, but life moves forward, not backwards. If we stare at the rear view too long, we romanticize the past. We discount the hardships. We ignore the inconsistencies that are prevalent among military mannerisms and expectations. We forget that our military is no less perfect than our nation, and there’s been a lot of racial and sexist bias along the way. Seeing the past as our glory days means we are not looking critically about what happened to us and what happened to those around us.

Ten years ago, I decided to skirt around the more negative aspects of my service. I did not talk for many years about how I contemplated suicide after my first tour in Iraq. I did not want to share that part of my story and own up to how I did not take advantage of resources that could have been available to me during my service had I asked for them. I also was scared others would, because they often do, trauma compare and say that my service wasn’t as bad as someone else’s and that I was weak, unfit for military service. I didn’t want my family to know, for fear they would look inward and see that they failed me. I wasn’t showing up for myself back in 2005 and then again in 2014 when I started this blog project. I am no longer worried about sharing this intimate detail. I know being open and honest can help someone else decide to not commit suicide. Even if it’s only one person, that’s enough of an impact. Showing someone they can move forward from such negative thoughts and achieve things they never thought possible is its own reward.

I was only 21 years old when I let undiagnosed PTSD take me down a rabbit hole no one should. I wasn’t aware how much our brains are still developing in our 20’s and what intrusive thoughts were. I felt friendless, family-less, without meaningful connections anymore in the workspace, and, on top of it all, being temporarily broke added another layer of despair to my situation. The relationship I ended in 2005 didn’t alleviate my identity crisis. Instead of feeling relieved, I listened to sad songs on repeat and kept myself in a victim mentality. (Those songs are inspiring to me now, because I actually understand how the lyrics are stories of recovery and pulling oneself out of the bottom.) I was never a victim though. Life happens to all of us, and it’s not always pretty.

It was just my turn to go through some bad things. I didn’t have to make them worse.

Improving the quality of my life was not an overnight success. I woke up the day after deciding not to commit suicide still feeling pretty letdown by where things stood. My first six months of recovery were rough, and if I had trusted in the leadership I had, they would have been easier. Knowing that I was uncertain about staying in the Marine Corps kept me from seeking the professional help I should have utilized. I kept my secret although it still manifested on the outside. I was difficult at work. I lost trust in many relationships. My drinking was getting out of control. But I still persisted a little bit each day to live a better life.

And that’s part of why I want to expressly state we are more than our service experiences, good or bad. I live with PTSD, but I don’t let it define me. For all the challenges it’s brought me over the years–much of it discussed in this blog–it’s also allowed me to better empathize with victims of war. The traditional kind, not the warriors. People living their everyday life that see their access to a safe community disrupted, or they’ve grown up during a war and never known anything different. When they finally get to be part of a safe community, it can feel like a frail gift. An outsider who comes to the United States may see their challenges stack up when there is anti-immigrant sentiment, support structures are broken (i.e. a lack of interpreters, non-English forms), and the boundaries between assimilation processes and expressions of individuality are blurry, giving rise to miscommunication and perhaps increasing their safety risk. Our nation has a long history of doing some level of harm to allow a select group of individuals to get ahead, and that bad habit still persists today.

My interest in social justice evolved from one originally, narrowly, focused on the Post-9/11 veteran community. This subpopulation was the one I studied when I pursued a Master of Art in Social and Cultural Pedagogy. I branched out *a little* when I later pursued a Master of Public Administration, which allowed me to further study the laws that impact veteran benefits. I still love looking at how our nation can better serve our veterans, part of why I was willing last month to discuss why I refuse to vote for Donald Trump and why he’s the reason I left the Republican party. But I cannot just care about our nation’s veterans. They are one of the many communities that are deserving of a better life here in the United States. As much as this country has held a special regard for our service members and veterans, even imperfectly, I know we can hold space for many others who are just as deserving. Dr. Emily Smith talks at great lengths in her book, The Science of the Good Samaritan, about trickle-up economics and the benefits it holds for us as a country.

My heart and vote are going towards the side that’s looking to do more for the most vulnerable among us. I’ve had my hardships. I didn’t get through those all on my own. A small amount of unemployment compensation in 2007 helped ease my rocky transition out of the Marine Corps. My VA education benefits (used between 2008 and 2017) alleviated most of my higher education costs. Two bouts of unplanned unemployment between 2012 and 2013 were less devastating when my family qualified for SNAP (food stamps). Those periods of unemployment I went without health insurance, because who can afford $1,000 plus a month for COBRA health insurance, made me fear any symptoms that could expand beyond the common cold. (I couldn’t even fathom if I had gone through all that during the pandemic, but others did.) Of all the challenges I’ve faced, being without health care was the worst. Even in the past few years, my health care needs have increased; I switched from using private health care to using my VA health care benefits to ensure I could access care when I needed it. Not when I knew I could afford it. I agree with Dr. Smith that we need to work towards increasing medical care access to the most vulnerable for better outcomes for them, their families, and our society.

I’ve benefitted when life looked really grim, and it’s only right I continue to support helping those in need, in the ways I can. By the way, there is no one right way to help. We all have a different amount of resources, including time, that we can devote to serving others. I donate to causes I believe in throughout the year, but that choice may not be accessible to others, part of why I wanted to share what I read. I’ve grown to love non-fiction works more over the years and some of the most important lessons covered in a college classroom (social inequality, financial planning, changing social norms within and across cultures, etc.) can be found in books at a local public library. Not only can we encourage the use of public libraries to reduce the costs of reading materials for families in need, but by supporting our public libraries, we increase the amount of circulation each book has. (I also donate unwanted books from my personal library to the public library to help reduce printed waste and allow my books to enjoy a second life.) To accompany this blog, I have a public Instagram profile, @service_was_a_place_to_start, where I am sharing different books that are broadening my understanding of the world, my upbringing, and many of the challenges for particular communities.

This new offshoot project is something the 2014 me would have been a little too nervous to share, because these books are beautifully in your face: foreign words painting pictures of different lifestyles; FACTS, yes facts, that cannot be ignored; and anecdotes that remind you childhood is something we continue to relive as we grow up. These books aren’t for egoists or narcissists. You have to trust, as a reader, that the world is made up of many pages with stories that differ from your own. There is space for more stories to be added. Learning about world challenges doesn’t mean you are a bad person for enjoying your privilege(s). Instead, it’s a moment to recognize you have privileges. We shouldn’t have a scarcity mindset that helping someone obtain access to a better life means that ours will be downgraded in the process. I want to reiterate these things in the books I select to share.

I welcome you all to join me in discussing some of your favorite books. If you join me on this journey in social media, all I ask if that you are kind with your words to me and to others in our community. I am not here to tolerate hate-filled speech or verbal abuse of any kind.