I didn't have a traditional transition from teenager to adulthood. At 17 I walked into a Marine Corps recruiter's office, still hungover and, with my mother's blessing, signed my life away. A few months later I was on the yellow footprints at boot camp getting screamed at by drill instructors. That was my transition. Sink or swim. Grow up or wash out.
I didn't know anything else. Didn't have a plan B. Didn't come from money. Didn't have a college fund waiting for me. Hell, didn't have the grades for college. The military was my way out. My path forward. The only option I saw that made sense at the time. The challenge was surviving it. Not just boot camp. All of it. The discipline. The structure. The demands on your body and mind that never let up. I had to learn fast. How to follow orders without question. How to push through when everything in me wanted to quit. How to be part of something bigger than myself. I was a kid pretending to be a man. Surrounded by other kids doing the same thing. And somehow we made it work.
I wasn't a perfect Marine. I wasn't a perfect man. I failed at being present for my family more times than I can count. Deployments. Training. The job always came first because that's what was expected. That's what I told myself anyway. I failed at taking care of myself mentally. Stuffed everything down. Kept moving. Didn't process. Didn't ask for help. That caught up with me later in ways I'm still dealing with. I failed at being patient. At listening. At slowing down long enough to appreciate what I had while I had it.
But there were successes too. I served over 20 years. Made it through deployments. Made it through the bullshit. Built a career after. Earned my stripes. I married my wife when we were young. We're still together over 30 years later. That's not luck. That's work. That's choosing each other over and over even when it was hard. I raised two sons. They're good men. They're making their own way. They turned out better than me. That was always the goal.
The military shaped a good deal about how I think. How I lead. How I react under pressure. How I approach problems. The failures taught me humility. Taught me that I don't have all the answers. Taught me to ask for help when I need it, even if it takes me too damn long to do it. The successes taught me that showing up matters. That persistence matters. That you can fail a hundred times and still end up somewhere good if you don't quit.
I walked into that recruiter's office a kid with no direction. I walked out of the military a man with a lot of miles on him. Broken in some places. Stronger in others. The transition from teenager to adulthood wasn't a moment for me. It was a process. A long, messy, painful, rewarding process that I'm still going through. Because honestly, I'm still figuring out who I am and who I want to be.
Maybe that never stops.
Thanks for reading,
Joe
Notes:
-All content is mine unless otherwise annotated.
-Images are my own unless otherwise noted.
-Photos edited using Linux photo editor and drawing and/or iPhone SE.
-Page Dividers from The Terminal Discord.
