I’ve been think­ing over and over for quite a while now about com­ments some of my friends have made, specif­i­cally about my atti­tude post-navy experience.

I don’t really know, but I think maybe my friends and fam­ily think the navy expe­ri­ence ‘taught’ me that I’m a fail­ure, they want to blame my neg­a­tive self-image on the navy expe­ri­ence, but that’s not really true. I’ve always thought that I’m a fail­ure, even before join­ing the navy, and the navy helped me real­ize why that is, and that I’m not alto­gether wrong in think­ing so poorly of myself.

I also think that maybe my friends and fam­ily think I didn’t learn any­thing pos­i­tive or help­ful from the expe­ri­ence, but that’s also not true, just that it was so unex­pected that I haven’t come to terms with it enough yet to share it, and on top of that, it brought to sur­face a vast mul­ti­tude of psy­cho­log­i­cal issues that I’ve been doing my best to repress for a long time.

I really wish it were eas­ier to explain, or that I were con­fi­dent enough to be able to just list all my issues, and how they’ve effected my life, and con­tinue to effect my life every­day, but I’m not, so for now, peo­ple just need to know that I learned what I needed to learn from my expe­ri­ence in the Navy, and that I’m hop­ing I’m strong enough to even­tu­ally move for­ward, even though I know I’ve got a long path ahead of me, and that life will prob­a­bly get even worse for me before it gets truly better.

I hate being obscure, but for now, its the best I can do.