Devastation

I remember a day in my graduate program that I called my mom to pick me up and take me to lunch, and I cried all through lunch and all the way back to school...over some insult I can't remember. It was devastating at the time, and I remember thinking I could never face my colleagues or professors after whatever it was. Of course, I did, and, of course, it was probably nothing.

I couldn't have imagined the years that would follow of incessant abuse for no obvious reason. When I joined the army, I imagined that the training would be physically hard and that every effort would have an obvious reason to the army's benefit. But what I found was a population of war-weary, embittered individuals looking to humble the civilians given to them for training. I endured what can only be called abuse for the sole reason of stilting the egos of humans that had been too far degraded themselves.