It’s one of those stereotypical situations.
There’s someone important to you in your life, and they’re about to take a path where you feel like you’re gonna lose them. Yet you also feel that the path they’re taking is also what’s best for them. And so the right thing to do is let them go, and control your emotions the best you can.
Or is it maybe simply that there’s a change happening, and you don’t want for it to happen? There’s a diversion from how things are, and you’re naturally set to oppose it since it’s out of your hands.
But this is going to happen regardless though, no? When I graduate at the end of next year and everyone goes on their own ways, pursuing careers and lives hundreds of miles apart, when the next set of friends comes from the pool of employees with whom you work.
And then comes the question of a military officer career. Enlisting as an officer in the U.S. Air Force is one of the few paths I have towards becoming a pilot, given I pass corrected vision requirements. But training to become an officer in the military is nerve-racking, between the intensive training and the devotion to the military and the government. It becomes a commitment.
But it’s still a career, right? It’s still a walk of life like any other, where you have to train before taking up the job, where you report to the job daily, where you get paid a salary.
But the one thing that makes it not like any other career is the commitment, the legal and moral contract you made with the government, the fact that orders will be given and that they must be followed. You can’t just say “No” or leave whenever you want.
The lack of control, I think, is what shakes me up the most.
Yet I’m still trying to push myself to consider it. Because a life of service, action, and actually physically doing something is one I’d enjoy.