A year later...

I've decided that I need to have a blog. The number of readers is unimportant, but writing is so vital to my life and I need to continue with it. I don't really know what I intend to discuss in this blog, but I assume it will end up being like my little black Moleskine journal – a collection of my thoughts and feelings on a given day. I'd planned to do this during my deployment last year, but when that fell apart, I felt no real reason to bother. I'm coming back to that blog to write about my future now and I'm going to try to commit to writing in this blog every day for a month. Maybe more after that. Hopefully more after that.

For the past two weeks or so, I've been making an effort to actively write. I'm maintaining three projects and one is nearing completion. I don't really think that the content is terribly important though. Like I always tell my brother, “It doesn't matter what you write, just that you write. The words can be rearranged later, but if there's nothing there in the first place, you will forever be waiting for the words to come to you.” So yea. I'm starting this fourth project now. My other three are a science fiction epic (set in a universe that I began years and years ago and which has been evolving ever since), either a summery or an entire book about my faith, humanity, God, and everything, and finally a design concept for a new class in World of Warcraft. I don't know if anything will ever come from any of these projects, and honestly I really do doubt that there's any real future for them. This, however, is irrelevant. I'm happy to finally be doing something that feels more 'tangible' than everything that I've done for the past year.

Early in June last year I was assigned to the 321st MI Battalion for their deployment to Afghanistan. While I went to them with trepidation, after the first month of pre-deployment training, I was excited for my deployment and for my future when I returned. Unfortunately, the second month of training turned out quite badly for me and became my last. For various reasons they removed me from the deployment roster and sent me back home to my unit back here.

I've been home since August of '09 and have been fighting against the Army's general consensus that I need to be discharged for almost the same amount of time. Looking down at the calendar is so surreal to me – to see that I've been fighting to stay in for nearly an entire year. Ten days ago was my three year mark in the military and I keep playing over the past three years in my head over and over again. I feel like I've lost so much but gained nothing. Memory of this loss is filled with pain so paralyzing that some days I can barely move. Objectively I know that I am nothing. This pain is nothing compared to the pain that others have gone through and continue to go through, but it doesn't change the reality of it.

I'll admit it. My discharge has a lot (if not everything) to do with me. Things I said, things I did. I could have stayed in and I would have been fine. I know this now and I knew this then. I chose to allow everything I was keeping contained inside me to come out. Despite there having been some serious issues I was dealing with, I will forever look back on this with tremendous guilt because I know that the day I started this, I did so with the intention of getting out of the military and the knowledge that I absolutely could make it happen. I've since tried to fix what I've done, but I've gotten in the way of myself and sabotaged my efforts. I've made some gambles and I've lost every one of them. Now I have to live with the results.