Retired Solider

Dear Reader,

I used to be a solider, a martyr — offering myself up on the alter. When I left the military at age twenty-one, I moved to Europe for study abroad. I lived in Austria, and, no, there are no kangaroos in Graz, which is near Linz, think the Schicklgruber lineage.

While I would like to lay back and kick it, having survived some pretty tough stuff, there is an urgent and global need to elder up. I remember when I joined the Army National Guard at age 17, I thought to myself: “I could retire by fifty-seven,” which I believed would end my suffering, like some kind of afterlife — or a Capitalist heaven called Florida, where humans of the anthropocene cos-played their good ol’ college days on AstroTurf and lived to be 115 with no wrinkles or gray hair.

I hate to break the news: retirement is “a sincerely held religious belief” like Santa.

I math funny so when I was signing away my life to the government, I didn’t calculate what early retirement would cost me. Namely, forty long, hard years of my sacred attention and labor devoted to working as a disposable tool serving nefarious ends.

Now, I’m forty-two years old with no retirement in sight and a nine-year-old child, a life that is not entirely all mine. I share this life with a lot of other people of which I play just a small part. As someone who’s been pregnant and survived childbirth, I can testify that my body has agency and a direct impact on others, and that we’re connected beyond our wildest understandings.

We’re relational beings who understand ourselves and the world within the sweaty context of the vivacious many. It’s like the parable of The Blind Men and the Elephant.