The Tale of a Quarter-Life Crisis

One semester out from finishing my BA, I joined the Air Force. I desperately needed a change in my life, and I knew the military would provide it. What I didn't know is what I would gain and lose from the experience.

When I deployed in 2017, I got the first taste of what it meant to support a conflict. My job required me to keep up-to-date on the worst that humanity was capable of, the status of current events, and to help decision makers create and execute plans with the information given to them. All while my training whispered to me: If you're wrong, you could get someone killed. I didn't understand that until the moment someone said to me, "Thanks for giving me that information. If you hadn't, it would have been a bad day." From that point on, I pushed myself even further to uphold the oath I took, but even a small piece of the complex military machine can feel the weight of it.

I struggled during that deployment in the moments when I wasn't absorbed in work, because, outside of that, there wasn't much else. Even my usual means of relieving stress failed me, and I was at a loss of what to do. Fortunately, my still-active-duty husband said to me, "Hey, didn't you used to write? Why not do that?"

Could I really write a (great) book and get it published?

For years, writing had been a guilty pleasure of mine. I say "guilty pleasure" and not "a valid hobby" because I was often told writing wasn't something real adults did; it was only for those lucky and special enough to be deemed worthy. But, on the other side of the world — in the desert heat — and the monotonous grind that had become my life, that didn't matter. So, I started typing without any real idea of what I was doing, and over six months, hours of work, and thousands of words, I completed an absolute dumpster fire of a first draft. Then I wrote more and more until I had completed three more projects (that weren't quite a dumpster fire).

When I left the military, I was once again faced with a choice of what my direction in life would be. Could I really write a (great) book and get it published? After leaving dog grooming to become an intelligence analyst in the Air Force, publishing a book didn't seem impossible. Best of all, I don't need luck or anything special; I just need the right tools to hone my craft, and with Drexel's help, I'm well on my way to writing this new chapter in my life.