Help convince me that I’m the problem
M/29
Tongue-in-cheek title, but I’m complete serious about feeling out of touch with my family and need others who have been in my shoes to voice their opinions. I’m not looking for validation, just the opposite. If enough people tell you you’re wrong, you must be wrong, but I can’t seem to care enough to make the mental flip and care about these issues.
I just missed the third Mother’s Day in a row, and I’ve been missing birthdays the past few years. That has pissed off my parents to no end, which I understand. The first two years this happened, 2023-2025, were my first two years out of active (8 years) and my first years in the Guard. Went to college for a year, met a girl, became disillusioned with my degree, then dropped out after breaking up with the girl during finals week. Had burned through my finances on a beater car and took a $20k loan for a newer car with a long warranty, joined the steel industry to have a job, then settled into a rhythm of drinking after work to forget my problems.
I’ve no excuses for this period of my life, I’m not proud of it and managed to work out of that slump. I was and still am an alcoholic, but I haven’t drank in a year as of a couple days ago, the reason being I just returned from a year-long deployment to CENTCOM. I have gotten past the point of craving alcohol and have thought through all of the issues that I’d been burying for the last half decade, and I’m not proud of where I am now, but can at least look to the future with hope again. I’m returning to college this fall in a new degree program that is more aligned with my interests, and I am now out of debt with a healthy savings built up. I feel like I’m able to return form this deployment with a fresh start.
Yet I missed Mother’s Day a month ago. My father reminded me five days prior, but every day blended into the other over there to the point that I constantly forgot which month it was, let alone what the date or day of the week it was. I’ve had three deployments now, have spent COVID in Germany where the countries were locked down for two years, and have worked many birthdays, Christmases, Easters, and other federal holidays. They all feel like just another day, especially when the alternative is to celebrate them alone. My last three birthdays, I forgot it was my birthday until almost noon. This is the mentality I have towards holidays: they stopped having any meaning when you can’t share them with anyone.
This is the mindset I’ve carried with me, despite sobering up and remembering the past year’s birthdays and wishing my family well on them. But now I’ve missed Mother’s Day, this time being the third time in a row. No excuses this time, but I can’t bring myself to accept how angry my parents are with me. I know I must be the problem, but it’s hard to care. My whole family is a military family, so it’s not like I’m unique in my experiences except that I’ve spent six of the last 11.5 years of service outside of the country, away from family.
I’ve spent so much time away from them that I feel anxiety whenever I visit them, and I’ve changed as a person so much since high school that I have to wear a mask when I’m around them. I do not act like my normal self around them, and my dad even wrote an email the day I deployed telling me how I’ve become “the worst thing a man can be: unreliable.” Yet my entire history of being an NCO shows my leadership considers me their most reliable NCO, and my joes always loved me. I was rated first in all three NCOERs as an E5 on active duty, and I’ve had soldiers in the Guard from previous companies I’ve been in come up to me and say they missed having me and that I was one of the most reliable NCOs they’ve had. There is obviously a disconnect between the army and my family, but I can’t seem to bridge it.
If anyone can relate to my mindset and has been able to get out of the numbness, please tell me what helped you make that mental flip to start caring more about what my family cares about. For the time being, it feels like just obligatory nods to dates that don’t matter, and I know that makes me the problem, I just can’t seem to fix it.