“Sometimes we can only find our true direction when we let the wind of change carry us.” —Mimi Novic
June 22, 2022- May 16, 2023
I moved from Tampa to Chicago in June 2022, again packed up my Sudan full of clothes and basic things, and drove up to where I stayed on an air mattress in my best friend’s spare room. It was the last month of his lease, and we were searching for a bigger place for us and two more of our friends. Moving to Chicago wasn’t the smoothest thing. The apartment we had secured for August was found to have fleas in the basement three days into living there. Unfortunately, I had already flown down to FL to bring back my bed and other furniture, so here I am driving a U-Haul up with my mom as my friend calls me to tell me our place that we just moved his stuff to has fleas… Meanwhile, my mom is looking for a hotel for us to stay at in TN; our options were to stay somewhere with bed bugs or one with no hot water… Somehow my mom, Michelle, was able to figure out a good place to stay while she flew back to Tampa the next morning. Having no other options, I finished the drive to Chicago hoping that it would be a solution we could solve. Unfortunately, it did not, and it led to a month-long dispute with the landlords and 3 exterminator visits to no avail.
Eventually, we decided to bite the bullet and pull out of the lease, paying a fee for breaching the contract, and all dispersed to different living situations. I moved to the neighborhood next to where I grew up, and into a family friend’s house, setting all my furniture packed into their garage, while I moved into Kyle’s room; a place I had many sleepovers at as a kid. Where I was staying was 45 mins -1.5 hrs outside of the city by train, or car, and I commuted to Downtown to start attending classes on September 5th.
On one occasion, I was sitting in the living room with my mom as a hurricane was approaching Tampa, and my mom said, “This is how I prefer to go through a hurricane, on the couch with a glass of wine in IL.” She was such a funny lady, and I’m so grateful for all the time I got to spend with her while I was figuring things out post-Marines.
I went through that school year trying to figure out how I fit into this world that I was completely separate from, living in 29 Stumps. I was attending Columbia College in Chicago and was at least three years older than all my peers. It was a constant practice not to turn jaded or bitter toward my classmates who were experiencing real things in their lives, like not seeing their family dog for 3 three weeks or missing family members. All things I had experienced before, and often to a larger magnitude. I didn’t want to forget that just because I had gone through things that were more extreme in some senses, I had no idea what each of these people’s lives had been up until this moment. Regardless, though, it was a struggle to relate.
StrengthsFinder really helped me because it gave me a lens through which to view the world and see what ‘strengths’ I naturally had, leading me to explore jobs that might call on those certain strengths. After taking the test, my top 5 traits were: strategic, relator, adaptability, command, and responsibility. By using this lens, I was able to sift through a lot and concluded that I’d enjoy being a photojournalist. I had already desensitized my nervous system to be able to handle stressful situations, so I thought that I might be able to capitalize on that and report on places that might be experiencing distress.
Arriving in FL, I had no idea what I was going to do and didn’t even have a glimpse of what my plan would be moving forward. I had, however, been pretty consistent in the gym since being in Australia and coming home from deployment, so I decided that could be one place I maintain a “non-negotiable” mindset. Once the holidays ended, I got a gym membership with my brother, who was a sophomore in high school at the time, and we started waking up before 5 am to hit the gym before he went to school, and I started doing side work.
I was fortunate enough to have a family member who was a contractor and was able to work with him periodically for the seven months I was in Florida. My main focus was to do a full mental detox to shed the ideologies or conditioning the Marines had given me. I hoped to return to myself and meet parts of myself I had never interacted with before.
Although this was a very intense detour from what I thought the plan would be, I/we rolled with it and moved into our new apartment on October 16th. For that month and a half, I lived in Crystal Lake, and I was really able to ground back into past versions of myself I had forgotten about while in the Marines. My mom came up and stayed with me while our friends were off watching their daughter play volleyball.
I picked up reading for the first time since high school graduation and intuitively grabbed a book called “Strengths-Finder” at a thrift store. The book talks about focusing on the brain pathways you naturally have and trying to make them better rather than focusing on the areas you lack and trying to increase those.
