As I sit here in my room I can’t help but think about my life, past, present, and future. In order to give a better perspective on the point of this entry, I’ll start at the beginning.

Like many people in this world, my upbringing was that of a lower middle class family, poor and full of struggles. My family was far from perfect, a father who, well, was constantly ‘thirsty’ and didn’t take his anger out at the gym, if you know what I mean. My mother, bless her heart, was always trying to make up for all the shortcomings in the family and failing miserably, and by failing she caused her own misery. My siblings, they lashed out in their individual ways, like all children do: my brother turned on society’s laws and my little sister found her comfort in the opposite sex. Me, I was different, I was the black sheep so to speak, my entire childhood I kept one goal in my head and applied that goal to everything i did, and that goal was to be better than my family, to never fall victim to the things that they did.

Throughout school I kept a 3.2 gpa, I never touched drugs, and I was always in bed at a sane time. Though I never fit in at school (there’s that black sheep syndrome again) and had a very small group of friends, I got by, barely. However, my attempts to stay in touch with reality caused me to fall out of touch with my family and a lot of my childhood. I found myself fully self-sufficient and self-supporting by the time i was 15; I held two jobs at any given time, bought my own food, clothes, and even my car at the age of 16– a 1996 Infiniti luxury model.  At that point in my life I rarely slept at home in order to avoid the fighting.

Around this time was when I met my current fiancé, it really was love at first sight. We met at the movies through mutual friends.  Just looking at us, our friends would say that we were so alike it was obvious we were meant to be. He kept me sane in otherwise insane times of my life.  He’s the 12-foot tall and thick titanium wall between me and the crazy world, and I thank him everyday of my life still.

I graduated high school and began to look at where i wanted to take my life. To be honest, I had no clue where to start. I was barely getting by on my own, living out of my car for the most part, had dead end jobs that made me enough money for gas and basic sustenance. That’s when Tony (my fiancé) found a job down in Alabama for a private-sector flight company attached to the airport. He moved to Alabama and I couldn’t stand the idea of a long-distance relationship, so we pulled together and moved into an apartment just down the street from the airport. Immediately following that, I decided to join the Army Reserve, more as a fall back plan to ensure that I would have money coming in. Because I was a delayed entry recruit into the Army, I held various jobs in the meantime –waitress, desk clerk, freight and stock, call center support, you name it really. I could never hold a job very long, mostly because i was a very quiet individual at this point in my life, very timid and withdrawn (cough, black sheep, cough).

May 31, 2007, I was finally off to basic training immediately followed by AIT where i felt like i was back in high school.  I had maybe 3-4 people I really hung around with, but they were good people, trustworthy and would never get me into trouble, well, at least not without taking full responsibility, heh.  Other than that, I didn’t really connect or get along with any of the other soldiers.  Once I graduated from AIT, I joined up with the 314th PAOC out of Birmingham AL.  During my first drill with them, I got a feel for the personalities around me. I honestly wasn’t sure how things were going to turn out and still am unsure about a lot of my feelings towards this unit.

Soon enough, we were activated for deployment to Iraq, right as I was settled in and ready to start back up with my life of course. It’d been almost a year of drilling with the 314th, and you’d think after a year of being around a certain group of people, you’d be used to it, but I wasn’t and still am not. Even with everything we’ve been through so far, I still feel disconnected from the inner social group, once again, the story of my life — black sheep syndrome. But even so, i wouldn’t want to go to Iraq with any other unit.

I don’t blame others for my shortcomings as a socially-capable human being. Give me a stranger and I can be their best friend for one day, but any longer and I begin to fail. The only exception to this has been my fiance. That is why he’s the only ray of light in my life; for six or so years he’s stuck by my side and just this past Christmas he asked me to marry him, something I never thought I’d hear in my lifetime…

Now with the past and a bit of the present a little more clear, i have begun to look towards my future… I’m 21, engaged to the man I love more than breathing and Pop-Tarts, and facing a deployment to iraq for almost the entirety of 2009. I can honestly say, once again, that I have no clue what the future holds for me but one thing i do know for sure is that even a black sheep eventually finds its place, even if that place is not where it’s at right now.