Why am I here?

Military Dependents

I moved every three years on average when I was growing up because my dad was in the army. I realized our family’s life style was abnormal around the age of eight, but it wasn’t until college that I began to discover the many ways that lifestyle had impacted my development and life. After asking myself that question for a couple of years, though poems and creative writing, I finally decided to delve into the research on military dependents. One thing I found was that military dependents view themselves as impermanent pieces of the community—meaning they have a hard time forming long form relationships with places. It also means that when conflict arises, we tend to run instead of dealing with conflicts that arise because we recognize it won’t matter when we leave that specific place. I often feel the same way.

Since graduating from undergraduate, several of my current realities have created tension with this world view. I’m at a point in my life where networking means everything, so I don’t want to damage my reputation in anyway. I recognize that as a lawyer—specifically a black lawyer—I’m now in a much smaller community and this is a community that feels like it’ll be much more difficult to truly escape than other communities that I have joined. Finally, I never liked moving and always wanted to be part of a community and help other communities thrive.

First Job

That final reason is why I worked for a small nonprofit in Washington, DC dealing with education policy. My job was to convince State Boards of Education to adopt policies that would promote diversity and encourage equal educational opportunity for all students. More specifically, I compiled and presented research on the negative impact of punitive discipline on students of color, teacher equity, and school desegregation. I learned a lot about education policy. I can tell you that one suspension in the 9th grade increases the risk of dropping, and each additional suspension increases that risk by 20%. About 60% of black males have been suspended at least once, compared to only 25% of white men. I know this disparity begins as early as pre-K.

However, while I felt like I was doing good work, I was not happy. Change is very slow, and the organization was nonpartisan. This meant that we often had to stand by as state boards adopted policies antithetical to our overall message. Additionally, I felt as though policy work on its own was not enough. Policymakers often had difficulty communicating with teachers and the implementers of their policies, and, therefore, implementation always left something to be desired.

Most importantly, however, was the fact that the environment at this organization was toxic. There was a high turnover rate and a culture dominated by cliques and power struggles. Even though I did not realize this until later, my position was created as part of a power struggle between two people working within the organization. Therefore, I was involved from day one, and at times this made everything very uncomfortable for me. When things became too stressful, I decided to apply to law schools. If I got into a school I liked, I’d go, and quit this job in the summer before classes start. If I didn’t get into a school I liked, I’d wait it out another year or so.

By March, things were different. I could no longer handle the toxic culture either. After my direct supervisor said some things she should not have said, and after I realized I was still being asked to perform secretarial duties when other entry-level employees who started after me were not, I decided to quit much sooner than I had originally planned. Additionally, I had increasingly become disillusioned with the idea that change could happen because there were so many moving pieces. Education policy was only a very small piece in a very large puzzle made up of many tiny pieces. Additionally, school desegregation and implicit bias would only go away if white people decided they no longer wanted segregated schools or wanted to enroll in a cultural competency course. I began t of feel as though my work was meaningless, I couldn’t afford health insurance, and I still had loans to pay off. So after eight months, I quit my job and started working at a library for a month until I received an offer to participate in a program that allowed me to work at a law firm before law school.

Almost a year since I sent in my letter of resignation to the nonprofit, I still feel like I ran away from the job. I am glad I left the organization, but I still feel as though the work was important yet meaningless at the same time because of the difficulty of effecting change when all of the pieces necessary for actual social change don’t work together.

There are two subjects in this draft: (1) what my childhood gave me; and (2) what I learned in policy work. I think that of the two the first is clearly more important. The primary route to the improvement of the essay is to concentrate on it. From the primary point of view, the role the secondary topic as to illustrate: it shows the tendency (as you interpret the experience) to run away rather than to face confrontation. I'm not sure that's right: you appear in fact to have stuck out a bad job, and the accompanying office politics, longer than many other people (not necessarily the children of soldiers) would have done. But leaving that story to stand for what it does, in your view, stand for, it can still be narrated in two sentences, leaving more room for what really is the subject.

Which is, how do I make "long form" commitments in my life, given my upbringing? As it turns out—perhaps not very surprisingly—you are already solving that problem, but fearing that your solution isn't good enough. You do want to make community, do want to put down roots and have a long term somewhere. You haven't failed to learn a lesson about roots that other children learn, because no children can in their short lives learn about the long term of anything. Instead, you've acquired a fear of causing disruption, of being responsible for breaking things off, not because you ever were, but rather because intelligent children tend to hold themselves responsible for causing (or not avoiding) the disruptive things that happen around them.

So now, as you say, you feel concerned that you will harm your reputation, make it harder for yourself to be part of the community you are joining, and so forth. In the job, you felt responsible for "running away" from a situation that had "leave" written all over it, even after you were pushed to go.

Let's try a draft of the essay in which you explain how it feels to have dissolved this invisible barrier. What is it like to understand that you are just as capable of long-term commitments as any other young person, and that you've just been more apprehensive than (some ) others that you are going to sabotage your ability to commit? How does it feel to have only everybody else's problems: finding where and who and how to make life commitments, in whatever proportions suit the you you are only now fully becoming for the first time? That draft may not be the one you put back here, although I hope it will be, but writing it will certainly be good for the author in any event.

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