Portrait of Jenny

Excerpt from my letter home from Iraq, on March 28th, 2008:

On Good Friday, one of the combat controllers from the unit that I am deployed with was killed by an IED in Afghanistan. Technical Sergeant William H. Jefferson was 34, and he had spent seventeen years of his life in the military — four as a Marine, and thirteen as an Air Force combat controller. He was married, with an eight-year-old daughter; his wife is seven months pregnant. He was one of the men slated to return from this deployment early for the delivery of his unborn child. Before he went out on Friday night, he had watched his wife’s sonogram video, and we were told that he left in high spirits. And then, after an act of horrifying, deliberate violence, his wife answered the door on Saturday morning to find that she would not be welcoming her husband home in a few short weeks, that she would now bear alone a child who would never know his father.

TSgt Will Jefferson was, by all accounts, warm, generous, funny, good-natured, a devoted and loving husband and father, and a seasoned veteran truly dedicated to the service of his country. He had asked to be sent back out to run with a team for this deployment, to go to one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan… to serve with the boys on the ground, to get dirty. These men, in this profession, do not serve to stay safe or to do the easy jobs. They are all here because they could not resist the siren song of real combat, and they all ask for the opportunity to be in the thick of things. They will all gladly jump to go to the places that lesser men are grateful to avoid. It is rare for a combat controller to be killed in action, not because they don’t face serious risks every day, but because there are relatively few combat controllers and they are so well-trained. And still, a coward crouching behind a rock in Afghanistan can end the life of anyone who is in the wrong place at the wrong time. And still, this arbitrary, chickenshit hatred will leave behind an irreparable and empty gash in the lives of our fallen comrades’ brethren and their families. I have read the reports and seen the pictures of the battle damage suffered by the vehicle and the personnel inside after the IED went off, after the vehicle was blown thirty meters from the explosion site. While I cannot report the details here, I will say that they are both gruesome and stark in their brevity.

I never met this man, but I have been in the midst of this squadron’s grief for nearly a week. And though this hollow loss was created by hatred, I have watched a ferocious brotherly love rush in to that vacuum to make things as right as they can ever be. That’s one thing about the special operations community… as a senior captain, a helicopter pilot, half-cynically, half-gratefully told me, “No matter what else I can say about life in AFSOC, I’ll say this: the one thing they do right is to take care of you after something happens to you.” I have seen first-hand that no expense was too great, no inconvenience too burdensome, no obstacle even stood a chance when it came to bringing our fallen hero back to his home and his family and observing his death in a manner that befitted a warrior.

There have been at least four memorial services for this man, and the one I participated in here was the single most moving ceremony I have ever observed during the nearly eight years since I first put on a United States Air Force uniform.

We stood outside in formation in the hazy glare of the Iraqi sun. Almost a hundred and fifty people — most of whom had never met this man — were in silent, voluntary attendance. We were placed at ease, but we stood still for a long time in the late afternoon, quietly, scarcely moving as we waited. The sun was setting when we were finally called to attention. The American flag was raised, and lowered to half staff. Then began the tradition known as “roll call.” Our Senior Master Sergeant called the name of three airmen from my squadron, each responding “Here, Senior.” Then he called for the fallen by his rank and last name. Traditionally, there is no reply, only silence. When we planned the ceremony, we did not even guess — not in a million years — that there would be another TSgt Jefferson in the audience, and when someone responded “Here, Senior,” by pure reflex, there was just a split-second where I could feel the surprise of the other people who knew the way the script was supposed to go. But the tradition also holds that the next line is to call for the fallen by their rank, first, and last name… and after “Tech Sergeant William Jefferson,” there was no reply but silence.
Finally, he called for “Technical Sergeant William H. Jefferson.”
Two beats of silence.
And then a response.
“Sir, Technical Sergeant William H. Jefferson has been killed in action.”

We were put at ease again, and there were several speeches and prayers… and for a situation where no words can help, my commander — this brave, tough, bold lieutenant colonel who has won so much of my respect during my time here — did his best to pay homage to the life of his brother. There was only one pause, quiet and completely dignified, where I knew he was trying not to cry again, to hold it together in front of all of us. He finished his eulogy. The Chaplain prayed, and the overall mission commander here spoke briefly.

Then… and words will not do this moment justice, but I will try for you because I have to share the importance of this moment, because it carried in it everything that is important to me as an American.

The honor guard returned to the flag. As taps played, they lowered it and removed it from the flagpole. They folded it so carefully, so gently, so precisely. The first honor guardsman handed the flag to the second guardsman, with fierce ceremony, and the second guardsman clutched it to his chest. He turned and marched slowly, deliberately to where my commander stood, and handed it to him… again, with the pride and power due to this flag and everything it stands for. My commander held it to his chest, and strode forward to the base of the flagpole. At the base, they had set up a pedestal with a photograph of TSgt Jefferson, a red beret, and a pair of boots, a rifle, and a helmet, in the traditional configuration commemorating the fallen. My commander knelt and laid the folded flag with tender, simple reverence on the pedestal, at the feet of this small memorial.
He remained there on bended knee.
Time stopped for us all as he honored the life and service of Will Jefferson with a tribute more eloquent than any words could be.
He stood, saluted, and turned to go.
One by one, every single person in attendance filed quietly up to sharply salute Technical Sergeant William H. Jefferson and everything he stood for.

My imperfect but heartfelt Catholicism has given me an eye for ceremony, and I honestly believe that if he had seen our memorial service, the Pope himself would have been moved to genuflect, for a moment, at the memorial we left at the base of that flagpole, and at the sacrifice made by this man, who died on Good Friday in a fight — at its root — for what is good and right in this world. I believe that despite the trash and triviality that threaten to overwhelm our nation, the real heart of America beats with the blood of people who know that real freedom belongs to every man and woman on this earth. As long as there are people willing to fight for that freedom, our country has hope.

But still… the virtue and heroism of this brave man’s death are small consolation to his family. Please, if you would — Will Jefferson’s wife and daughter and his unborn child… keep them in your thoughts, and if you pray, keep them in your prayers.

This was my first experience with combat loss, and I wish I could say it was my last.  There are far too many stories like this, and we as a nation seem to have grown fatigued with remembering them more than once or twice a year.

I’m not here to guilt you into sadness, or to judge you for how you’re spending your Memorial Day, unless you’re confusing “trying to shame other people for an inadequate display of patriotism” with “honoring our fallen in a meaningful way.” I’m seeing a lot of sanctimony on the web today, with notes of condescension towards what are perceived to be insufficient commemorations of the sacrifices made for our country by our honored heroes. Know this: anyone who has truly grieved the loss of someone killed in combat doesn’t need to be reminded to honor them today, or any of the other 364 days of the year; anyone who hasn’t is unlikely to have their paradigm shifted by a social media post.

I have also seen reminders that today is ONLY about those who were killed in combat. But something to consider: many veterans have lost all semblance of a normal life in service to our country when they sustained disfiguring and disabling injuries, including the kind that don’t leave any scars (traumatic brain injuries and severe post-traumatic stress disorder come to mind, and don’t underestimate the emotional damage to veterans and families who measure their deployed time in years, not months), and in my not-very-humble opinion it’s perfectly OK if you wish to honor all who have suffered for their service to America. Especially since they still need our help.

Finally, recent events have driven home an important point. When someone is killed in combat, whether you believe they have gone on to a better place (and I do) or simply that their pain is over, they are no longer hurting. The people who need support now are their family, friends, and loved ones.

Remember those who have sacrificed so much for our nation privately, or publicly, however you choose. If you feel moved to acknowledge the day in an outward way and find yourself at a loss for how to make a difference, please consider giving to the Wounded Warrior Project, the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, or any of the other excellent charities that support our surviving wounded and the families of all who have given so much in service to our country.

Now go, please, and hug your family and friends, do a little shopping if you like, and enjoy your barbecue.

The first election I remember was in 1992. I was in third grade, and my elementary school held a mock election. Kind of a charming idea, really; teach kids the value of civic duty and the meaning of representative government, compare the results to the national election, and plant the seeds for involved citizens of the future.

I don’t remember who I voted for (it might have been Clinton – I think I felt vaguely betrayed when he got himself impeached) or why… but one thing sticks with me still about that fall.

My parents wouldn’t tell me who they voted for.

I remember being curious, and my usually-exuberant mother being shyly dodgy about it the way she always is when she’s decided to keep a secret. The explanation for why, I imagine, must have come from my dad, whose reasoned eloquence is hard to argue with (but not impossible, as I learned in my teen years). My parents considered their choice of elected official to be an intensely personal one; I think they would have discussed any of the facts in the election with me (and probably did), but when it came down to which lever they’d actually pull in the voter’s booth… that was private.

I think some of this probably stemmed from a desire not to unduly influence my young mind towards a particular political bent. They taught me a firm and consistent set of values, and I wonder if they hadn’t decided that it was more important to give me a good foundation and let me decide which house would best stand on it.

Of course, nearly-nine-year-olds also aren’t exactly known for their discretion. I imagine my mom and dad were wary of the possibility that I might let slip their personal politics to the neighbors, or that I’d wind up choosing sides at the lunch table in a discussion that I was too young to even begin to understand. And in looking back at this choice of theirs, I realize just how clearly they understood the divisive, caustic power of the American political conversation, and I’m grateful.

For years, I have suffered under a hopeful delusion that all my fellow Americans are reasonable humans, capable of holding a respectful conversation and attempting to find common ground on the way ahead for our cities, states, and nation. I have never wondered about the contents of friends’ ballots so much as the contents of their hearts. But the more snarky Facebook posts and rude tweets and cruel jibes that I see from people I otherwise know and like, the more concerned I am for the ugliness that is overtaking our collective souls.

Perhaps I am at a disadvantage, having grown up in a household where one’s inner political world was treated as somewhat sacred. (As I matured, so did the political conversations in my family, by the way, and we are quite open about politics now – within the “circle of trust,” of course.) So while there are a few issues for which I will proudly plant my flag, and I will make a jokey observation about any politician or candidate if the mood strikes me, it seems strangely intimate to tell a friend who I might vote for, let alone to declare it for all the world to see.

And nicely, privacy affords me the luxury of being wrong without also being terribly embarrassed. When it comes to so many things, I feel quite immature and unwise. The places I get my information are flawed. I don’t know everything. There are many people who are much smarter than I am, but many of them have agendas I can only begin to fathom. So whenever I’ve joined in an ad hominem attack or succumbed blindly to hype, I feel deeply ashamed. My perspective isn’t perfect, and I try to keep my mind open to new ideas that are argued well and supported with evidence. I worry that I don’t always question this evidence the way I should, but I am willing to try, because I think we should care about our government. We should feel free to discuss the election if we wish to; we should feel compelled to learn as much as we can from credible sources before we enter into debate; and even if we do this passionately, we should also do it carefully, respectfully, and sincerely, especially if we have any hope of persuading the other side to see our point of view. And even if the other side starts to fight dirty.

So please, in this election season: be gentle. Polite, even. And before you add more smarm and rage to the WWWeb, consider how much quieter and kinder the world would be if we were all a little more private about these things. After all, no matter who wins, we still have to live with each other.*

*unless the zompocalypse is nearer than we think… which is why I’m glad my husband is shopping for a katana right now.

I don’t think Lady Gaga is fat.

Not objectively, anyway. When I first saw some of the unflattering photos that have grabbed headlines lately, I thought she looked like she had gained some weight. She still appears to be within what is considered a healthy BMI range, and if her costumes weren’t so ill-fitting, the photographs would have been far less remarkable.

But in our world, it’s big news when a blonde female pop singer gains or loses weight (or is alleged to have done so), so… whatevs.

I’ve actually really enjoyed Lady Gaga’s music over the years — my sister, ever the early adopter, sent me “Just Dance” before Lady Gaga became, well, Lady Gaga, and about half of her hits have wound up on my mix CDs and party playlists. I’ve only watched a couple of her professionally-produced videos. “Bad Romance” because it struck me as eerily beautiful, darkly fascinating, and artistically kinda daring. “Born This Way” because I’d heard it was a bit of a rip-off of Madonna. And her utterly charming “Lady is a Tramp” duet with Tony Bennett, because it was just a delight. I thought she looked great in all of them, and I’ve always found it interesting that her image seemed to be predicated more on the outrageously surreal than the traditionally beautiful. (How many of us, really, could pick her out of a lineup?) She is a changeling provocateur, and I think she has the genuine talent to back it up. (Even if you’re not crazy over her pop, check out her performances from the Tisch School before you dismiss her entirely.) She’s charismatic, and she’s got some positive messages; she’s not hypersexualized like so many pop tarts, and above all, she seems to be a woman in control of her destiny.

And now she is launching a Body Revolution. While I admire her bravery in admitting to a history of eating disorders, and I think this is wonderful in theory, I’m not sure what the reality says about us all.

I was curious to see what this Body Revolution thing meant, so I signed up for a Little Monsters account. I looked at her photos, and then I looked at the fan submissions, and then I had to stop and think about why it was all bothering me so much.

First, I was struck by how many objectively attractive people are sharing their secret self-loathing, captioning photos of perfectly nice bodies and faces with the struggles they’ve had to accept themselves. I hate seeing evidence of wildly distorted body images, perhaps because it reminds me of my own struggles there. (More on that in a minute.) What does it say about us as a society, that even these people feel bad about themselves?

Of course, some people are pretty obviously just fishing for compliments, which seems to defy the entire intention of the project: “to inspire bravery, and BREED some m$therf*cking COMPASSION.” (Emphasis Gaga’s.)

What I didn’t expect to see were the people who are posting evidence of physical deformities, diseases I’ve never heard of, and health issues that have nothing to do with body weight. These are people who aren’t represented at all in the media, not really. Even a show that makes an effort to portray a more diverse population (like, say, Glee) doesn’t have an actor with severe scoliosis, or a leg that has been mangled by an animal attack, or a large port-wine facial birthmark. The sadness that these people describe is jarring; I can’t begin to imagine what life is like for a person with a disfigurement or a disability, and their newly-professed courage struck me as both beautiful and heartbreaking.

Now, as someone who (like so many) has struggled with eating issues in the past, I suspect it’s hard for me to view the Body Revolution objectively. My story’s not unusual — high achiever under lots of pressure develops an eating disorder because she needs to control something in her life. I usually gloss over the difficulties I had while I was at MIT, but the truth is, my eating disorder was a big part of the reason I left. I’m healthy now, thankfully, and while some other time I might get into the specifics of my struggle and my recovery, the important thing here is that I know I’m seeing this through the lens of my experience. Maybe I’m a little cynical, or maybe I’m just a little sensitive, but here I am, and I know I’m not alone.

And while I think it’s brave of Gaga to publicly admit her struggle, and awesome that she is encouraging acceptance and compassion, I believe this isn’t a meaningful dialogue yet.

Objectively, the pictures that kicked off this Body Revolution are mostly rather flattering pictures of a slender, healthy-looking woman. They seem intended as an f-you to the “fat-shaming” camp, but in these photographs, she is not anything that anyone in their right mind would ever consider “fat.” I empathize with her internal struggle and I respect her for admitting it publicly, but I’m just not sure that these photos of a lithe body in a matched bra-and-thong set are quite as daring as they are being credited.

(Just for the record, if you’re looking for true body bravery, my money’s been on Nancy Upton for awhile — the woman whose satirical, compelling photo submissions to American Apparel’s crude attempt at a plus-size model search put the company in a VERY uncomfortable position when she won the contest.)

The other troubling thing with the message these pictures send is… you know how people say “I’m not even going to dignify that with a response”? Lady Gaga just dignified the snark. Lady Gaga is saying “my body is still up for discussion.” I used to think of her as someone whose crazy barely-even-human fashion ensembles sent a message that her body had nothing to do with her worth as an artist, but the pictures that started her “Revolution” are, ultimately, a confirmation that she is a star whose body matters. Whereas someone like Adele, who has cheerfully flipped the bird to the snark at every turn and has been wildly successful, has shown us that her talent bears no relation to the shape of her body whatsoever. (Let’s be honest — if Adele were a three-headed purple octopus from Mars, no one would care.)

So while I admire Lady Gaga’s intent, the fact that some apparently think she has done this to “prove she is not fat” — and, it bears repeating, she is not fat — means that she has sent a decidedly mixed message.

Looking at all the pictures submitted by adoring fans, I am worried that this movement will create a place where people are finding “thinspiration” instead of inspiration. Or where people are comparing themselves to each other in an unhealthy way. Or, maybe worst of all, a place where people are expressing “virtual compassion,” scratching an altruistic little itch and patting themselves on the back for being open-minded, but where nothing is really changing.

It is easy to look at photographs of a stranger and read their struggle and think “aww, gosh, we’re all really beautiful on the inside.” But our ableist, fat-shaming, ageist, sexist (and sexually-conformist), and even racist society has programmed us well. Those of us who are privileged (with health, with ability, with bodies and faces that conform to traditional notions of beauty, with youth, with a gender presentation that doesn’t bother anybody, and with a skin tone or features that don’t come with a set of prejudices — and I am speaking very self-consciously as someone who currently has all of those privileges to one degree or another) are not really being tested here.

We’re being tested when we decide whether or not to consume media that has an ugly message. We’re being tested when we choose whether to laugh at (or tell) a mean-spirited joke. We’re being tested when we have the chance to shut down cruelty with a well-placed “that’s not cool.” And we’re being tested when one of these strangers — someone who is “different” in a way that society doesn’t really tolerate — sits next to us on an airplane, or in a restaurant, or in a classroom, and we decide how to treat them.

Lady Gaga, I think your heart’s in the right place. If you steer this message carefully, you might be kicking off a good thing here. But if you want to start something truly revolutionary, there’s a long road ahead.

(This post was inspired by a Twitter chat with my friend Sabrina, who was also kind enough to review it for me before I published it. She is a talented writer and editor and a delightful, thoughtful human being, and you should go say hi to her on Twitter at @Sabrinaslibrary, and check out her awesomeness here and here.)

No one warns you about how hard the Air Force Academy really is. Sure, it’s “challenging” and “stressful” and “character-building,” and you have a bedtime for four years.  Just describing the experience gives rise to an awful lot of cleverness.  I call it “the Lord of the Flies meets the Stanford Prison Experiment.”  My friends were fond of saying things like “they strip you of all your basic human rights and give them back to you one by one as privileges,” or “the Academy is like the uncle that molests you, but pays for college.”

I jest, but the experience can be uniquely damaging to some of us.

[Now, I know we're not that special.  First of all, there's all the other military academies.  Then there's plenty of civilian schools that pride themselves on the suffering through which they put their students.  (MIT, I'm looking at you.)  But please don't let your sense of alumni pride be wounded by this - if you say you suffered more than I did, I promise, I believe you.]

The one thing that got me through was knowing that, for all those people who called college the best four years of their lives, for us there’d be nowhere to go but up, debt-free and out into the wild blue yonder… knowing that the relationships we’d built there in the shared stress would be some of the most important and lasting of our lives.

But there’s at least one catch in that bright future, a catch that makes it much harder than you realize it will be.

Imagine college for a moment.  Fraught with all the immature ventures into what one thinks adulthood should be… learning to drink, learning to date, figuring out step by raw and tender step who you might be when you grow up.  Imagine all the things you might have been proud of, all the shared joys… but think, too, of all the things you might have been embarrassed about, all the secrets you’d prefer to leave trapped in dried beer on the bar floor like so many Jurassic mosquitoes who picked the wrong sappy tree.

Now imagine you went to work for the same geographically-distributed but centrally-controlled company as every single one of your classmates.

It can be wonderful and joyous to see your friends again, in the most unexpected places.  It can be inconvenient to see those who aren’t really your friends.  Especially if you dated much, and I did.  You cross paths with such “unfriends” enough in the real world; it’s a bit more irritating when it happens in a combat zone.

Back before I ever made it to a combat zone, I spent a long ten months after graduation in a somewhat small training class with a college ex.  It had ended badly — in retrospect, he was guilty of no more than being a little troubled and very young.  Certainly, no worse than I was.  But I was still young when we were in training, and still embarrassed about the way I’d conducted myself towards the end of our short and troubled relationship – dramatic breakup lines, cryptic statuses, ill-advised drunken reconciliations.  Seeing him every day was a reminder of how much I feared I hadn’t grown up.  It was made worse, too, by the fact that I still admired him; he was smart, and self-destructive in a way that was terribly interesting to me (back when I fancied myself something that would later be termed a Manic Pixie Dream Girl).  These conflicted feelings were fueled by his occasional drunken overtures, coupled with obliquely-worded critiques of the friends I’d chosen, which I took as backhanded compliments.  (Dear young readers: things like these? Not compliments. Not good signs. Run away.)  And all these things made me so, so, so angry.

I wasn’t angry at him, really.  It was me, and it was the reminder of the way my life kept hitting a discordant note.  I was headed towards a career that I thought I had wanted for so long; I was dating a wonderful guy who would, much later and after I’d grown up quite a bit more, become my husband.  (We were dating long-distance, though; a cruel irony, to live hundreds of miles away from my true love, but spend fifty hours a week ten feet away from someone who made my young blood run cold.)  But things felt wrong.

See, I hadn’t yet figured out that happiness isn’t a checklist.

I hadn’t ever stopped to think about what I wanted, instead of what I thought would impress people.  Headlong, I had chased a sexy, daring, movie-trailer dream of my future job.  I told myself all along that I knew being an Intelligence Officer wouldn’t really mean being Sydney Bristow… but secretly thinking that if only I found the right code to the right door, I’d wind up air-dropped into a foreign country and sneaking into a billionaire’s birthday party to steal a gorgeous emerald necklace that hid a computer chip that could destroy the world.  Or, you know, something.  And that no matter what happened, being an Intelligence Officer sounded cool.

And although I was very happy with my wonderful guy, I told myself that I was okay putting love on hold for a little while and following this career, so I could take cool trips around the world and jump out of airplanes and flirt with mysterious strangers.  I was a Headstrong, Independent Woman.  I didn’t want to plan my whole life around the wonderful guy — not just yet, not at twenty-two, because that’s not what Headstrong, Independent Women did.  [Let me be clear: there are many very, very good reasons to end a relationship - and the ones I just listed are perfectly fine, if you're being honest with yourself.  If so, Godspeed, and go very gently into that good breakup.]  Neither he nor I had much choice about where we’d live for the next few years, and long-distance relationships have a tendency to keep you one-foot-in, one-foot-out of your daily life.  It was probably good for both of us that we took a couple years off.  But I wasn’t honest with my heart, and that was ultimately very dangerous.

If I’d stopped and looked at myself with the loving but sharp eye of a concerned aunt, I might have realized that many of my decisions were leaving me terribly sad and lonely, on the whole.  You might make all the same choices and find yourself very happy, and seriously, high five for that.  Heck, I found myself very happy, every once in awhile.  But in the end, I didn’t know myself, and I wasn’t true to myself, and that happiness never lasted very long.  I grew more frustrated every day with the fact that my impressive life wasn’t impressing me.

So, long story short, I kept fantasizing about hitting my ex with my car.

But I’m not a naturally violent person, and though the opportunity continued to present itself in our training-dormitory parking lot, I managed to graduate our training course without blood on my hands.  (Or my windshield.)  But this rage had stayed with me for so long it had been branded into my brain, and I took it with me when I left.  Our minds are like soft rocks – you scrape back and forth along the same path so many times, and it wears a groove into your neural pathways, reinforced every day until it’s as visceral as an addiction (and about as easy to get rid of).

Weeks after graduation, I was in Italy, on vacation with my family – the land Elizabeth Gilbert would later establish as one-third of the perfect “Forget Your Ex” trifecta!  Come on! – and my anger would pop up, apropos of nothing, like a sneering jack-in-the-box with ill-advised tattoos and a thing for screamo.

Now, I’m really not a very good Catholic, on the whole.  There are lots (LOTS) of things I disagree with the Church about, and there are a few more that I agree with and feel an acute sense of guilt since I do them anyway.  But try as I might, I can’t stop believing in a God.  I tend to feel like I’m in His presence pretty awesomely in grand places… and it doesn’t get much more grandly, awesomely Catholic than Vatican City.  Yes, I feel a wincing grief when I look at all those stunning frescoes and commissioned sculptures and gravity-defying feats of architectural brilliance – I wonder how many starving children all this money could have fed! – but I also feel inspired, and reverent, and reflective.

I also usually feel like I ought to go confess all my sins, immediately.  (I don’t always, but then I tend to feel like my skin is on fire.)  There are tons of people who aren’t into confession, and that’s ok.  I understand.  Some other time maybe I’ll tell you why I like it, and perhaps I’ll get into why I can’t quite stop being Catholic.

For now, just know that it was not terribly out of character for me to take a break from my awestruck wanderings through St. Peter’s Basilica and veer towards the first empty confessional with the “English” label outside.

The priest inside began the ritual in a sweet, rich accent that I couldn’t quite place.  It could have been anything, but his voice sounded so wise and so mellifluous that I didn’t care.  I started recounting my sins in the stilted, archaic language that tends to come to me in the most traditional of confession booths (and does it get more traditional than St. Peter’s Basilica?).  And then, unbidden, I told him about my anger.  My words grew more natural as he asked me questions; my voice broke as I described my rage.  Through my tears, I asked him, how could I possibly get rid of this feeling?

I expected orders to pray, to read the Bible, to write a letter and destroy it, something.  Instead, in firm but gently lilting tones:

“Sometimes, we must learn to forget.”

That’s it?  ”But Father, I’ve been trying to forget.”

“Then you should try harder.”

I thought I sensed a hint of “your time is almost up” annoyance creeping in at the edges of his tone.  I stumbled quickly through my Act of Contrition and left, absolved and perturbed.  I felt both the exhilaration of holy forgiveness, and a nagging sense that I had gotten some bum advice from a guy who wasn’t even allowed to date.

But telling him, it turned out, was a good first step.

As the days tumbled on, I was lighter, undistracted.  It became easier and easier not to think about it.  (Granted, it’s easy not to think about anything troubling when you’re in a villa in Umbria, but – I thank my lucky stars and my dear, departed Granddaddy – I digress.)  It wasn’t a magic spell or anything, but my secret anger was out of my chest, and I had been given permission – nay, a divinely directed order – to just fuhgeddaboudit.  It wasn’t the end of all my problems – I had a lot more learning to do over the next few years – but it was a small victory.

I don’t recommend forgetting for all the problems in your life.  There are a lot of things in this world that are only going to get worse if you forget about them (like credit card bills, or that thing in the back of your fridge that might have been an orange, once).  But the things you truly can’t control?  The things that eat away at you, and there’s nothing you can do?  Try telling someone (a priest, a therapist, your most non-judgmental and least-enabling friend)… and then, try to forget.  My counselor describes it as “picking up your brain and moving it someplace else” (a handy, if potentially macabre, visual).  Just give it a shot.  And if it doesn’t work… then you should try harder.

The truth is: I am not a blogger.

I mean, I’ve had blogs. Over the years, I think I have played with at least a dozen names, a hundred formats, and at least three or four gimmicky ideas for what to do.  I had a Blogspot page back in college; it’s still up out in the inter-ether. I hesitate to post a link to it because it’s humiliatingly sophomoric now, but at the time it was a lot of fun. I took quotations from friends, teachers, and lovers; often out-of-context, usually humorous, with special preference given to anything that was especially complimentary. I gave everybody codenames and pasted the link to it at the bottom of my AIM profile (remember when that was a thing?).  If it taught me nothing else at the time, I learned how much most people love seeing themselves in print. The intention was never for anyone but my friends to read it (and I’m really quite lucky my mother never did). Fortunately for me (and, well, everyone else in my life), I’m much better-behaved now than I was then, and slightly less impressed with myself, so that sort of thing is no longer really an option.

The other close call I had with blogging was during my three deployments to Iraq. When I left, I was the only person most of my friends and family knew who had actually gone off to the war at the time. (I was in the first wave of my Air Force buddies.) Everyone was worried. On top of that, they beat us over the head repeatedly with the whole “operational security” thing – i.e. never talk about where you are, what your job is, when you’re supposed to leave, etc. This made it harder to reassure my friends and family that I was, in fact, in virtually no danger whatsoever, as they believed that if I was, I wouldn’t be able to tell them anyway.

Finally, being deployed was hard. I’m an emotional, touchy-feely, lovey-dovey pot of crazy that’s often just one degree shy of boiling over, particularly in circumstances that I can’t control. Iraq was not good for me. So I did the only thing that felt natural – and the thing I eventually came to care about more than almost anything else while I was over there: I wrote.

I wrote letters that slowly and self-consciously turned into observational essays on deployed life, and I tried to be as funny and as positive as I could. I wrote about the time we ran out of non-drinkable water and everyone was put on shower probation and we tried to bathe with bottles of water (in wintertime). I wrote about the chow hall worker who saved me a box of fresh pineapple every day for a month. I wrote about the antics of the goofy young troops I worked with. I wrote about the weird jargon that the spec ops guys used, the guy who got caught picking his nose on the VTC, the places I’d go to hide from the world and look at the stars.

Eventually, there were more serious things. I wrote about the way our unit mourned their man who was killed in action, just weeks from going home to his seven-months-pregnant wife. I wrote about the toll I could see deployed life taking on the men and women that surrounded me, especially the ones who had spent more time deployed than at home since the war started. And I wrote about a classmate of mine from the Air Force Academy, a beautiful and brilliant girl, who was killed by an IED in Afghanistan.

My family and friends loved my letters. They read them out loud at work and at dinners with friends, and forwarded them to people I’d never met who asked to be put on my mailing list. They nagged me if I hadn’t written in long enough. And they told me I should try to get published, or at the very least, start a blog.

(Now, let’s be honest. Most of these people had some personal connection to me – and the ones who didn’t were usually very enthusiastic supporters of the military. I don’t want to operate under the illusion that my writing would have stood on its own, apart from its context and its connections – although believe me, I’d love to think so. And if I am lucky enough to publish a version of those letters someday, I will give every dime of profit to the Wounded Warrior Foundation and the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.)

The funny thing was, I couldn’t access any of the blog sites. It was before the military was on board with leveraging social media as a recruiting tool, so I couldn’t have blogged if I wanted to. And when I came home, I felt like I had nothing to say. Every so often something would kick up, but I didn’t have the pull of writing for an audience, as I was secretly worried that my followers would lose interest since I wasn’t writing about The Deployed Experience.

Which brings me to today.

I’m not on active duty anymore; I’m a pilot’s wife who lives in Japan, which is almost as far from The Deployed Experience as you can get — apart from the fact that I am, yet again, in another country. I thought about blogging from here, but then I found out that every pilot’s wife in Japan seems to have a blog about The Japan Experience. Many of them are writing just to keep family appraised of their exploits – or so they claim; I’ve noticed at least a couple who are probably angling to write “Eat, Pray, Love: The Military Spouse Edition.” In fairness, I spent my first deployment enthusiastically aping Elizabeth Gilbert’s giddy, pleasant, travel-friendly style myself – and that’s probably part of why I was averse to heading down the same path. The other part is that I was working out a lot of personal stuff, and just needed some breathing room.

But I had a lot of free time, and I wound up getting sucked into the playground that is the Twitterverse. I used it as a glorified headline feed for months – the social side eluded me completely. And then I started retweeting things I wanted to save for later.  Then, I realized that since almost no one was following me, I could say whatever I wanted. It’s no longer cool to say anything on Facebook unless it’s very important or very funny, but on Twitter, no one could hear me scream.  And a few months later, I finally realized, “wow, there’s a lot of people out there.” People who are totally different from the world I’ve spent the last ten years in. People who are possibly terrifyingly cracked in person, but are absolute geniuses in 140 characters. People who are plugged into political and military issues, and science, writing, and human rights, and other things that I’ve discovered I am very interested in now that I’ve got the time to learn. I’ve learned a lot from Twitter (perhaps embarrassingly)… and I learned one thing that drove me to start this blog.

It really doesn’t matter that much.

It’s not that people don’t do terrifically important and beautiful things on the internet – so many of them do. But there are plenty of missteps, false starts, terrible tirades, embarrassing overshares, and navel-gazing self-aggrandizements, too. So why wait timidly over at the wall by the punch paralyzed with fear, watching everyone else out on the floor having fun, even if they occasionally look like idiots? It’s time to get out there and dance like no one’s watching — er, write like no one’s reading.*

*Hey, maybe nobody is reading. And that’s cool too. But I’m a really strong extrovert who enjoys writing for an audience… and as you’ll see over on my About page, I will answer any question that I’m asked on here. I can’t promise I’ll answer it honestly, but I can promise I’ll try to lie to you in a  terrifically clever or creative way. So give it a shot. In exchange, you’ll get free publicity, excellent karma, and maybe even a free drink.**

**I didn’t say it would be from me.