An Easy Life

A troubled childhood, a confusing military career, and a year of sales lead me to realize maybe I'm not living right. I doubt any of us are. We are alive but I don't call it living.

“Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.”

Leo Tolstoy

I had two very different childhoods. One was with a loving mother and a great stepfather. The other was with an a*****e of a father and a twit stepmother. The result is who I am today: an insecure, cynical, dick. I trust no one and I always expect the worst of people. There is a side of me that is loving and generous but you have to be a member of the small group of people I keep close to see that side. I am genuine and call things as I see them and most people don’t like to hear the blunt, honest truth.

            I don’t remember a lot of my childhood prior to the divorce of my parents. The memories I do have are mostly of screaming and household objects flying through the air. I spent the majority of my time with my mother because my father was in the army and stationed in Korea. It was just Mom and me, which I don’t remember, maybe because it was calm and uneventful until I was three-and-a-half and my father came back to Ft. Campbell to join us. From then on, I just remember screaming and shattering lamps.

            My father got out of the army when I was four and we moved to Michigan, where my parents’ families were and where they grew up. It was after my kindergarten year that my parents decided to divorce. I remember blaming myself, because at that point a lot of the fights were about me not knowing my ABC’s and the school wanting to hold me back a year. This combination of chaos and my delayed educational development resulted in me being held back in first grade. I felt so worthless.

            Between my first, first grade year and second, my mother met my stepfather. He was exactly what I needed. He was a retired college professor and owned a few businesses in town. He had the patience of a saint. I remember him working with me on my reading skills. He would write little notes and leave them all over the house with directions to the next note and finally to a new Lego set. It took a lot of work, but by third grade I had finally caught up to my peers in reading.

            While my stepfather was working hard to make me a functional member of society, my father was destroying my confidence. I was terrified of the man. I could never do anything right. Any mistakes I made would result in him blowing up, throwing things, and screaming at me. I only remember him being physical with me once. It was a hot day when I was seven; I was a little chubby and insecure about it, so when my dad told me to take my shirt off I just froze. The whole family was over at his house and I didn’t want to take my shirt off. He flipped out and grabbed me around the throat and pinned me up against a fence, choking me, screaming that any time he tells me to do something I’d better do it. I had seen him get physical once before when he came late to pick me up from my mom’s. She yelled at him because she and my stepdad had to cancel plans they had, and he punched her in the face. My mom fell through the entryway closet and my dad grabbed me and took off. He was later arrested, but somehow I don’t remember that.

            Back with my mother and stepfather, life was normal. They got me into sports; I was a star football player and a great swimmer as a kid. They’d take me on vacations to Disney World, Aruba, and Hawaii. I worked at my stepfather’s bar on weekends for a little money. The only area that wasn’t perfect was school. I really struggled when I was around people my age. I didn’t want them to think I was dumb, so I would sit in the back and try not to be seen or heard. I wouldn’t do my schoolwork because I was scared of making mistakes.

            I only spent every other weekend at my father’s. I remember crying my eyes out, not wanting to go. I thought for sure something horrible would happen there. For the most part while I was at my dad’s, I was locked in the basement. There was a lot of space and it was finished. My bed was down there and some of my toys and a radio. Unless we were going out somewhere, my dad didn’t want me to bother him, so he would send me down there and lock the door. It was a little musty and I was constantly getting bronchitis as a kid. I remember spending most of my time just listening to the radio. I’d think a lot down there. I realized that my dad was always unhappy because he never had money. I also noticed he never had money because he was obsessed with buying junk. He always had the newest and the best toys he was into. He had expensive mountain bikes, guns, and motorcycles, but struggled to buy food when I’d come to visit. He always blamed me for being born and having to pay child support. I knew that it was his careless spending that kept him in poverty and I was his scapegoat.

            With earning my own money from working for my mom and stepdad I never really asked them for anything. If I needed something I’d just get it myself. This was always better because my mom was super cheap and had no taste. The stuff I’d buy myself I always took great care of and I’d wear them till they were falling apart. This drove my mom nuts. She hated my Levi silver tab jeans with huge patches in the knees and crotch that’d I’d fixed after wearing them out. My money went to the bank for the most part. I did set aside a portion for pot every week starting at 14 years old. I never really liked the stuff, but the cross-country team at my high school was a bunch of hippy types and it’s what we did. It made me less anxious as well, which was a nice break.

            I really struggled with depression as a kid. I remember thinking about suicide a lot. I was always afraid of failure and I thought instead of dealing with potential mistakes maybe taking my life would be easier. I couldn’t do it myself though; it just seemed too selfish when I had such a great mother and stepfather who really cared about me. I ended up in the army because of this depression. I watched the news all the time and seeing all the kids getting killed in Iraq and Afghanistan made me feel like that was my way out. The exact opposite happened once I got there.

            It turns out that not being seen or heard in the army is a huge asset. I was in great physical shape, which helped me not be seen. I was so scared of disappointing anyone I never let anything slip. I was rewarded after basic by getting to go to Airborne School then getting to go to the Honor Guard in Washington D.C. as my first assignment. There I tried out for the President’s Color Guard, which I got into. This was where I did my growing up. I started moonlighting at a Georgetown University bar as a bouncer and made a lot of friends and got to feel like I was kind of part of the school. I was always invited to parties and sporting events and had a great time. My job in the Color Guard was to carry a flag for President’s Bush and Obama and to go to professional sporting events around the country to present the American flag for the National Anthem.

            I tried out for a very rare and prestigious badge in the army, the Expert Infantryman’s Badge, and breezed right through it. I was promoted to sergeant and was on track for another promotion when I received orders to go to an Airborne Infantry unit in Anchorage, Alaska. Upon arriving there I was greeted with open arms. They were in dire need of infantry sergeants and my badge made me look especially attractive to them. I was given two weeks of power point presentations on the rules of engagement, the Geneva Convention Rules, and cultural sensitivity; then I was shipped off to Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan I replaced a sergeant who had snapped and gone into the headquarters on the base with a grenade and said they needed to send him home. Although I’d been deemed an expert infantryman, I’d never applied my knowledge. I was green and it showed. I wasn’t scared ever. I kept my cool and did my job but I never developed the hatred for Afghani people that my comrades did. They didn’t like that I was sympathetic to them.

It was hard for me not fitting in. I always wondered why we had to fight. It didn’t make sense to me that we were in Afghanistan when Saudi Arabians were the ones on the planes and who funded 9/11. Everyone else just seemed to have hate in their hearts, and I was constantly stopping my soldiers from abusing Afghans. I was reprimanded for not being aggressive enough. This destroyed me as a soldier. I tried telling my superiors we’re going to create more Taliban if we keep roughing up elders and innocent people when we do searches. They said that our safety was more important and we needed to treat them all like insurgents. My depression came back hard. It lasted through out the end of my deployment. I just sat in my room and watched the complete series of Seinfeld and read Dan Brown books, which helped me cope.

            I’d try to integrate myself with other soldiers after our missions but their idea of fun was playing Call of Duty and hunting the cats and dogs that would wonder onto our little base. I wasn’t interested. I never left my room when we weren’t on a mission. I felt as if I was locked back in the basement. I thought about how evil the world seemed. I spun downward into my own hell. I’d cry silently in my bunk. A few times I put the muzzle of my M4 assault rifle into my mouth but never really thought about pulling the trigger. I think knowing there was a way out made it easier.  

            Lucky for me, when I came back from deployment I was living in Anchorage. It was so beautiful there. I went to counseling twice a week, but it never really helped. The person who helped me the most was actually a chaplain for my unit. Even though I’m not a “religious person,” I definitely connected with him. He agreed with me that we were causing more harm than good in Afghanistan and I wasn’t crazy for thinking the world was twisted. He would tell my commander that we were going to do counseling and he’d take me out to go on awesome hikes in the Chugach Mountains. He helped me connect with nature.

            It took me 25 years to find a peaceful place. I found it in the woods. I started going on long hikes with some buddies. We’d backcountry camp with no one around. It was amazing to feel that the world was perfect but it only felt perfect away from people. I’d go out alone to be in the woods and think. I’d talk about what I’d think with my Chaplain and he told me to read some of his favorite authors: Jack London, John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau. It was a relief to know that I wasn’t the only one lost in the populated world.

            After the army a friend got me a great job. It was in sales for Dietz and Watson, a deli meat company. I struggled at first but I found my groove. Talking to people wasn’t easy for me. I had to tell myself before every sales call that the worst they could do was say no. It still hurt when they did, but I was able to tell myself, “It’s just meat.” After a few months I had gotten very good at cold calling. I was very confident in myself when it came to deli meat. I begged for an opportunity to bring our product to a new market. Greenville, South Carolina was my opportunity. I was finally planted somewhere after 6 months of flying to a new place every couple days.

            I found a lot of new business in Greenville and was rewarded well by the company. Then it was like I hit a wall. I started thinking, “It’s just meat” but this time it didn’t make me feel better. I started wondering if my purpose in the world was to sell. But I wasn’t interested in selling. After building the business in Greenville I was made the area distributor. Monday through Saturday I would get up at four in the morning and deliver meat, then try to sell more meat and get people to pay for their meat. It was a miserable existence. I wanted to have meaning in my life and making money didn’t have meaning to me. I gave the company two months notice and signed up for classes at Greenville Tech.

            I feel that it’s my duty to help others see the world differently. There is a chance for people to be equal and at peace. We need to accept that a more difficult life may be a better one, that buying little things to make our lives easier can actually make it ten times harder. That’s why I feel I need to become a social worker. I want to help people find an easier way to live. I want to unplug children from video games and help parents find that if they don’t have a cable or cell phone bill, they have significantly more money. There is a lesson I’ve learned in life: it’s that life is much easier and more peaceful if you can enjoy walking in the woods.

I still don’t know for sure how to best help people. All I know is that I want to live deliberately and avoid what is not really living. I have been witness to a lot of meanness and I want to publish my findings to the world. I believe life can be truly sublime. I want to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. This isn’t completely my idea; Thoreau helped me find the words. I believe the world could be all of our Waldon Pond, if we just change the way we think a little.