This is Chapter 6 in the Transition Memoir. Catch up here.
Even though my blog was called “Airman to Mom,” I had unknowingly started to find my niche in writing about military life. I struggled with how to move forward. I felt I needed to move past my military experience and embrace my new role as a mom and military spouse. To hold onto my experience in the military and continue sharing about it made me feel like I couldn’t let go. I was pushing myself to move through the transition phase of life and not allowing myself to feel the emotional change that came with such a dramatic shift.
Leaving the military seemed simple. I would hang up my uniform and be a veteran. It didn’t feel like a big deal and then it was. And years after I left I still was struggling with why I felt out of sorts. I must have done something wrong, I thought. I shouldn’t be struggling now. I left the military over a year ago. In my mind, the way to let go was to stop talking about my service. So, I put a lot of pressure on myself to let go of my military past and just focus on what was in front of me: my son and my life as a military spouse.
But the thing is, my military experience as a service member was still a part of who I was, and as I shifted from military service to military spouse and mom, I felt lost. As I continued to write, I bounced all over.
I connected with a few travel bloggers so I wrote about travel. I knew mom bloggers so I wrote about mom life. I learned about natural birth and thought that could be a niche for me. If I had stuck to one area of focus, I would have found more success, but I was alternating from one idea to the next, confusing any audience I had tried to start building.
It isn’t hard to reflect on why my blog was all over the place. My life was also all over the place. I had no idea who I was or what was next. Even though I had been out of the military for a few years, I hadn’t found a purpose like I had while serving. I was a boat out on the ocean being led by the wind instead of using rudders and sails to direct me where to go.
It was during this time that I started to connect with military spouses. When my son was a year old and I had started to find some sort of normalcy, my husband was given his next assignment. We moved across the country to California. I was excited to be on the West Coast where my parents lived, but I didn’t know anyone and felt alone.
It was my first PCS as a military spouse. It was also the first time I had moved with my husband. All my moves in the military had ended up happening after he had already moved to the next assignment. The lack of community that I had as my husband went off to work, leaving me with boxes to unpack and no friends, was really challenging. I somehow got connected with a military spouse entrepreneur Facebook group and started to find a community with military spouse entrepreneurs I met online.
Those connections pulled me back toward the military community and while I initially focused on my experience as a military spouse, the military spouses I met encouraged me to share my perspective not only as a military spouse but also as a veteran. They saw my experience as different from their own and I could help bring light to challenges they had experienced but were not given the same benefit of the doubt because they had not served.
It was the first wisp of figuring out who I was and helping me discover my passion for what would come next. I still had no idea what I was doing and where I was going but I was beginning to find my voice and I was dipping my toe cautiously back into the military community that I desperately was searching for.