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Hey man I'm available and local, though not sure how much help a 29 year old slick sleeve LT would be
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May 6, 2017 05:39
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 21:12 |
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I’m potentially spending almost the entire first half of next year in the field depending on how things get tasked out. We are in the best BDE. To be fair to your commander I don’t think there’s anything he could have done about it. We’re in the same boat across the field.
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Nov 20, 2017 04:57
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I just drink everyday I get off work, get angry about life in the Army, go to bed and wake up still angry at the Army. It's Definitely an awful way of dealing with things. I'm pretty bitter about how my married with kids peers get to use having a family to get off work, avoid weekend taskings, and have your spouse become friends with their bosses spouse so they're less likely to get poo poo on. Single soldiers just get relentlessly poo poo on. I've pretty much given up on dating until I get out of the Army because I either have to cancel because I never know when I'm getting off for the day or I'm just flat out too tired to do anything. I used to try to get out of working (at 1700!!!) if I had something planned with a girl but I get something like "you just met her, it can't be that important" and then I do whatever I had to do to make some box on a tracker turn green. My peers with families on the other hand get days off for anniversaries, kids birthdays and all sorts of bullshit. "My kids sick! Can't come in today even though my spouse stays at home!" Can't task so and so with this weekend detail! That's taking time away from his family! The Army is such a crock of poo poo.
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Jul 22, 2018 21:34
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Not really, my all time best friends are back home 3000 miles away. I have good friends here but they're either out of the Army and live over an hour away north of Seattle or the ones I still work with are married with kids and do poo poo with their families on the weekends. Me and my old PSG will go out and do poo poo like backpacking but he's also married with kids. On top of doing multiple peoples worth of work because I'm short staffed almost everything that misses a deadline is elevated way above whatever level it's being done at. Like as an S4 there's quite a few things where if I miss a deadline someone at BDE is briefing either the BDE XO or BDE commander about it. Even something simple like submitting a memo that will just sit in some folder on a sharedrive for years after I send it off. Due to the nature of the logistics of one of the training events we have coming up I've been making several products that my field grades periodically brief to our BDE commander. It's just extremely stressful having all this high visibility poo poo I'm responsible for and I'm more or less doing it by myself. Being the only LT staff primary also puts me in an awkward spot because my fellow staff primaries are all CPTs and I'm obviously the only S4 in the BN. It would be great if I could get an NCOIC and a halfway decent LT to work for me while having easily the most difficult workload of the non-S3 staff sections and doing it by myself.
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Jul 24, 2018 05:20
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This week I'm going to go to Behavioral Health for the first time. I'm so loving worn out. Just loving done. I'm on the BDE staff and treated like a CPT that's fighting to earn a command rather than a CPT that's on the way out. I just want to make it to the day I sign out on ETS leave without doing anything that violates the UCMJ or costs me my GI Bill. I can't sleep without sleeping pills from the shopette because I spend all night wondering what bullshit is going to get dropped on me the next day. Similarly by mid afternoon on Sunday I'm stressed out about how much Monday is going to suck. I don't have a shred of patience left for anything the Army does. I only have a few months of work left but the poo poo just keeps piling up. The expectations keep getting higher. I just want to be happy.
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Oct 6, 2019 03:10
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3 months of actual work left, hopefully. Then I'll clear and take 2 months of ETS leave. Just hoping the Army doesn't try to gently caress me out of ETS leave. I don't have any trust in my leadership. To them an officer leaving the military is someone to be squeezed for every last drop until they ETS.
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Oct 6, 2019 05:58
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Jesus, that's pretty insane, I had no idea anyone had any beer with you but I'm not active on the discord. Separately: I'm pretty happy with where I'm at in life, especially having just earned my masters but I still have some things I'd like to sit down and talk to someone about that isn't a friend or family member. Now that all I have to do is job search, I want to spend this summer making myself the most physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy I've ever been, and I've kind of neglected all of those things while in grad school. How does someone go about finding a professional therapist/counselor? I know there's veterans programs but none of the things I want to talk about have anything to do with the military.
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Jun 30, 2023 16:06
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Thanks friends, I looked into my school's programs and it looks like they're mainly for temporary sessions of 4-6 visits total. Currently looking through all the counselors and therapists near me, which looks like there's quite a few. I'm not too worried about the person having empathy, I've found people out here around Seattle are some of the most naturally empathetic people I've ever encountered. The people I went to grad school with are easily the most high quality group of people I've ever been associated with and I learned a lot from them. The school/program frequently espouses empathy and inclusion as values and both the faculty and students definitely live up to that claim. But yeah I totally get certain styles and techniques being better for some people and worse for others. One of the things that's been bugging me lately is something that's a result of moving so much throughout my life, both as an Army brat and again as a Soldier myself. I've realized I just naturally feel like an outsider everywhere I've been, despite making good friends in all of these places, though I definitely feel more at home in Seattle than any other place I've lived. But having "roots", and even knowing your cousins, aunts, and uncles well is something that is alien to me. Just feeling like my values are aligned with the people here in Seattle is the closest to any sense of "community" that I've ever had. I think one reason I've started to think about this a lot is the fact that many of my Army friends that also got out here have mostly moved back to the states they grew up in, and I only started making friends with WA locals since I started grad school.
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Jun 30, 2023 18:19
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Well, found a therapist that I was impressed with from her page and scheduled a free consultation next week, that was easy enough. Looking forward to it.
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Jun 30, 2023 22:10
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Really liking the therapist I've been seeing for the past 2+ months, but man is she expensive. I'm still looking for work, do employer healthcare plans often cover these kinds of therapists? Her website says she's an out of network provider but she provides a "superbill" to send to people's insurance. From what I've read I'm pretty sure the VA won't cover her service. I like the weekly appointments, but it would be like $6k a year out of pocket to keep that up.
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Sep 13, 2023 18:13
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Feeling pretty lovely lately. Got a fancy masters degree from a top 20 program a few months ago and haven't gotten a single interview yet (though many of my fellow graduates haven't either....). Questioning why I even got an MBA sometimes. Program/Product management, tech startups, AI buzzwords, making number go up, are all extremely boring to me. Getting rich is not a life goal of mine. The one thing I would like to do with my MBA one day is run my own business, doing something that adds value to my local community. But I don't have the money to start a company right now, and definitely not while I'm burning through savings while looking for work. At least I still have half of my GI Bill left. Coming to terms with the fact that I will never again live anywhere near my 3 best friends, and only one of them has ever visited me and that was back in 2017. All of my close friends from the Army have long since moved away from WA. The ones that are still here are mostly of the generic Army veteran type, with generic Army veteran interests and opinions. I like the oddballs and weirdos that go against the grain. One thing that has made me really happy lately is learning to oil paint, I was very into drawing and painting growing up through high school but stopped when I went to college. Did (and still do) photography in my 20s up to now, but never came anywhere close to scratching the same creative itch. I have so much free time right now I'm looking into taking other art classes. Feel like I'm reconnecting with a part of myself that I've neglected throughout adulthood. In the past week I've gone through an entire pad of canvas paper and an entire tube of white paint. Kind of pissed I was raised as a military brat and moved so much growing up. My parents still have that stupid loving "Home is where the Army sends you" picture on their wall. What a lovely loving lifestyle. And when my dad finally retired it was to the cultureless void that is the central Florida suburbs. One of the worst parts of an already lovely state, in the shittiest part of the country. And then I just feel dumb for feeling this way because two homeless encampments near me were just cleared out by the city, and those people have problems that are 10000x worse than anything I've ever had to deal with.
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Sep 16, 2023 18:31
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Dumped for the second time this summer. A friend has flaked out for a month now on taking our bikes on the Burke Gilman trail. He has a baby though so I'm more understanding of that. About the only thing I've accomplished this summer is regularly lifting, doing cardio, learning to oil paint. Which I guess is pretty good honestly. Was great meeting Crab Dad too, he's a stellar guy. As someone that had a very transient upbringing, knowing 100s of people around the country (or world), I would kill to know what its like to have "roots" somewhere. My cousin's girlfriend works for one of our big Seattle companies and wants to help me out, says she knows people in other Seattle companies too. So hopefully I'll start getting some traction on the job hunt soon. I feel like I put a lot of effort in to filling out my days but still have plenty of time to sit around dwelling on all the poo poo I'm not happy about. This stuff has been on the back of my mind for a long time, it's just now catching up to me now that I have the most free time I've ever had.
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Sep 17, 2023 22:09
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 21:12 |
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I just started therapy for the first time a few months ago, I highly recommend doing a lot of searching to find the right therapist for you. Mine is expensive but I think she's worth the cost. I just kept looking until I found one who had an outlook on therapy/life philosophy that appealed to me the most.
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Sep 28, 2023 23:30
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