The DMV Lobby Which We Call The Army Life.

Purgatorio, otherwise known as Purgatory, is the state of waiting to either enter the pearly gates or the pits of hell. It’s also the best way to describe my entire military career.

From the very beginning, I haven’t had a single sense of stability, whether it’s monthly barracks room moves, living in my car, hauling all my belongings across the country, or changing my career before I ever got settled. Even when I try to create stability, the carpet gets violently pulled from under me. 

The Army can teach you how to deal with immediate stress. In your first years, you are subjected to little sleep, suddenly getting woken up in the dead of night, people screaming in your face, jumping out of planes, and a limitless laundry list of future therapy sessions.

And though I’m constantly exposed to it, it doesn’t help you cope with the terrifying existential silence of nothing … nothing happening at all.

As if the universe commands you to tread in an ocean’s current for an eternity.

In the case of long-term stagnation, there’s nothing more terrifying than the quiet void in your life where nothing changes, and you’re left in shambles with whatever’s left of the plan you thought you had. My conviction used to scream beyond the mountains, now its whispers fail to stir even the smallest ripple of water.

After receiving a nonselect outcome in Psychological Operations Assessment and Selection (POAS), I was truly lost. I had already put in a year and a half of effort just to try to become a Psychological Operations soldier. Now I was staring down another three and a half years in the Army and after that, having to figure out an entirely new path.

Not only was my future unclear in the career department, but I was almost certain my relationship with my girlfriend of nearly a year would turn to ash.

I hit rock bottom all at once in the month of February, the shortest month of the year, but somehow the longest of my life.

I failed selection for the job I had trained a year and a half for. Then I found out I was going to be forcefully separated from my girlfriend. I got orders sending me to be a Military Policeman (MP) in the middle of nowhere, Texas. I was convinced I wouldn’t even get to do law enforcement in a job with the word “police” in its title that I was going to be a grunt as an MP.

When I found out this news I had just been in the field for two days. I hadn’t taken a shower in four. I had been effectively homeless for two months, living out of my car. I had negative $23 in my bank account.

Then my ankle got sprained again in the field, something that would take at least another month to recover from. At that point, I could barely walk. I sat in the ER for five hours just to be told it was a sprain. By the time I was discharged at 12:00 O’clock at night, I was starving and couldn’t afford food.

I drove my 2011 Toyota RAV4 to the Callahan Gym parking lot on Fort Bragg, “the center of the universe”, just to find somewhere to sleep. I couldn’t let the car idle because it was running on empty, and I had negative $23 to my name.

So I ate a cold, carcinogen-filled MRE I had tactically acquired from the field earlier that day.

And then, with a swimming pool of tears flooding from my eyelids, I laid there screaming as the pain kissed the felt interior of my car’s roof.

I began to mourn the life I thought I was going to have… it wasn’t coming back.

The plan I had spent a year and a half building toward was gone. And there wasn’t anything replacing it.

I was grieving for a reason. That current version of my life was gone, my routines, my friendships, my relationships, and even myself. Not in a resentful manner, but in the same way you lose touch with people you once spoke to every day. It all becomes a relic of times since when.

If you replace all the parts of a ship with new parts, is it the same ship? This is the famous Ship of Theseus paradox. This is a foundational law of the human experience. Whether or not it’s the same ship doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you have a newer ship. With every new wooden plank added, the vessel keeps sailing. Because this answer is not solvable, you don’t always get closure between different versions of yourself.

Whether you realize it or not, there is not just one version of you. You become a different person multiple times throughout your life, if not every day. The only vestige of who you think you are is your soul, that may be the only objective form of your person. For example, an apple can’t be objectively perceived the same way from all human perspectives.

In the military, you meet people you think will be in your life forever. Life lends you their love. Suddenly there comes a day where one of you leaves, and just like that, POOF! they’re gone. Maybe you see glimpses of their new life through a screen, but you'll never see that person ever again.

As a native of the social media era, I can attest that Generation Z doesn’t have the tools to find closure with people who are still alive but no longer part of their lives. People continuing on after they leave your life was once something reserved for religion, ancestor worship, dreams, and near death experiences. Otherwise, this is a completely new phenomenon.

It’s understandable how seeing someone you were once acquainted with announce they’re having a kid way too young, or seeing people you once called friends posting from downtown Tokyo can be jarring.

If a person is actually dead and gone, you can attribute fixed things to them. That’s why your grandmother is in a jar. It’s not as if she’s going anywhere anytime soon.

I used to think the hardest part of the Army would be the stress, the lack of sleep, the chaos, the constant pressure.

It was standing by and watching everyone leave.

There’s no funeral when you leave a place you once called home. You just keep moving, even when part of you is still in a parking lot somewhere, trying to figure out what just died.

Like it or not, we practice reincarnation multiple times throughout our lives. Whether you choose to believe its purpose above ground is preparation for what happens when it all ends, that’s up to you.

The beauty is in what I call a living reincarnation; We live a new life with every following moment as we voyage on the ship of Theseus.

Selah.