My World Is on Fire and I'm Cool with That

Francisco Vasquez

Bartholomew

ENG 101

6/16/2016

My World Is on Fire and I’m Cool with That

        Stress and depression are universal issues. At some point in life, most people will experience a sinking low point that will challenge their will to persevere, or maybe even continue living.  It could be a singular event with a major impact, or, in my case, a snowballing culmination of events that are slowly gnawing away at whatever mental fortitude you have left until you break. In retrospect, it wasn’t actually so dramatic that I wanted to blow my brains out, but boy did I have a sucky year that sure made me consider it a few times. However, the sucky year didn’t kill me, and for that, I remain alive as a much stronger person, and thankful for the newfound confidence gained and valuable life lessons learned.  The age old Friedrich Nietzsche quote “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger” suddenly has new meaning to me.

        August 23rd, 2015. That was the day I separated from the active duty Air Force.  I had enlisted in the Air Force for 4 years, and while I had a lot of good memories and met a lot of great people, I realized that I didn’t want to stay stuck turning wrenches on fighter jets for decades of my life while my youth wastes away. I wanted to better myself by earning a career I enjoy.  I wanted to be living life and going to school, chasing dreams like the other kids. When I was in the midst of separating, I was excited. I saw what I was, what I am now, and what I could become, all at once. In high-school, I was largely an underachieving introverted nerd who barely scraped by, doing the bare minimum required to get my high school diploma. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life and for the most part didn’t care. It was so bad that even cut classes to a point where I had to repeat my sophomore year. I was coasting, until I found myself while serving in the military. And so I wanted to bring the knowledge and experiences I had gained while serving into my transition towards becoming a college student, to redeem myself for those past mistakes.

        They say that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. In the military that’s something you’d catch an earful of if you were wanting to leave and your boss was trying to convince you to re-enlist. For a while, things were looking up, I was getting out of the military with an honorable discharge, which meant I earned my G.I bill for use to get paid to go to college, and I had a broad plan of how I was going to get by. I know I wanted to stay in Las Vegas and start my new life here, far and free from all the drama that moving back with my family back on the east coast would bring. For the first time I would be truly independent. Unfortunately, once the rubber met the road, everything started going downhill. Within the first few months, I had gone through a breakup with a girl that I thought might’ve been “the one”, 0 promising job offers, and financial stress. There was no money coming in from my G.I bill, due to missing registration for fall semester and thereby not actively going to school. I was struggling to adjust. My savings were rapidly depleting and I needed a job fast.

        October came around, and I had finally landed a job at a body-shop in Summerlin.  Just as things were looking up, the short-lived ray of hope died out a month later when I was laid off. I enlisted in the military straight out of high school, and so barring that, this was my first real job in the civilian world.  You can imagine I didn’t really know how to deal with the fact that I had just started to get comfortable and safe only to lose all sense of comfort after 4 weeks, and instead regain all of my financial stressors and anxieties back.  I was collecting unemployment checks for months following my layoff, and then just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, I get into a car accident in February where I was cited at fault and had to pay an exorbitant amount of fees to cover court costs and to fix my car.  Credit card debt was now accumulating quickly.  I was at an all-time low, and was second guessing leaving the Air Force to begin with.  How am I ever going to recover?  Will I be another homeless person begging for change at a highway exit?  I began to think about all the failures of my teen years and thought I just wasn’t capable of changing who I am.  I was an underachiever back then and I always will be.