My Forced Awakening
Contains all kinds of spoilers
The funny thing about “last straws” is that alone, they are light and insignificant. But there’s an old soldiering adage that says, “ounces equal pounds; pounds equal pain.” Your shoulders and knees feel that bag of morale skittles hidden at the bottom of your pack every single step of the way. It keeps getting heavier as you go, and eventually you ungracefully collapse onto the side of the road.
Last winter, Star Wars: The Force Awakens was simply the last straw.
Don’t get me wrong — I thought it was great. In many ways it went exactly how I wanted it to go. But it was one ounce more than I could handle and left me lying back on my pack like a stranded turtle. How did I get there?
The Camel’s Back
It’s a story many in this line of work are familiar with — I got married too young (21), had kids too early (22), and jumped straight off the deep end into a career as a military officer and aviator. Fresh out of college, full of religious zeal and altruism, I believed what I had been told my whole life — that I could do anything if I just worked hard enough. I took it a step further, and figured that “anything” also meant “everything.” My first problem was deep-seated and soaring expectations that could literally never be met. Near-continual, visceral disappointment in everything you’ve ploughed your life into is a devastating way to live.
The truth is, there are some things that hard work can’t achieve. Despite the messages we grew up on — with the religious undertones that bad things happen to bad people — bad things will happen to good people, things we thought were good will simply fail for no other reason than they are wrong, and there may be nothing we can do prevent it.
I lost my marriage. My choice, but still a loss. I filed for divorce from my career around the same time. Also my choice, also still a loss. Then, as a result of the first two, I did what is one of the more stigmatized things in our society — filed for bankruptcy.
Incredibly, financial loss is viewed amongst the circles of society I am a part of as far worse than divorce. Whereas the American church tends to treat divorcees as contagious “failures” (or victims, depending on which “side” you’re on), the whole of society tends to regard the bankrupt as degenerates. I write about it as one who has wrestled with the shame and stigma, and as one who wishes to broadcast to anyone else silently struggling with it that they are not alone. Choices get you everywhere, but as anyone who has fought a counterinsurgency would know, those choices are not linear or binary. They are far more than just a matter of mathematics.
Hard work and commitment alone can’t always prevent a divorce, prop up a disappointing career, or avoid financial ruin any more than they can win a war, implement successful policies, or make the world a safer place. I never lacked hard work and commitment. And all of the blood and tears I had buried in those things I lost made it all the more unbearable to toss away their dead embers and move on.
The Straw
In this short span of time where I lost so much, Star Wars took the last little bits of nostalgic table scraps that I held on to. They could have let me down easy. But instead, a red lightsaber cut away the last shred of everything my old life used to be built on. They knew exactly how to hurt me the most, and they did it on that screen, amidst a theatre resounding with the unburdened cheers and gasps of those who the next day revisited the experience with the reverie of a Christmas morning. Meanwhile I was alone inside of myself at a funeral of ashes and dust of my former life.
Like many, I grew up a total Star Wars nerd. Played the cards, and the role-playing game. Saw every re-release on opening night, along with every (undeserving) prequel. I was going to be Han Solo — I even wanted to fly an old transport aircraft in the military (this ended up happening). I married my high school girlfriend and she was going to be Leia. Watching The Force Awakens was like an old reunion. The analogy was pretty good — Han and Leia were split up just like me and my ex, but my kids aren’t Sith (yet). Oh and hey look, they’re flying the Falcon again (I don’t actually wish I was flying again). Then it happened. You know the scene. They built me back up, got me reacquainted with all those old feelings and memories, then cut them out of my guts.
This may seem dramatic, and it is. But in full knowledge of this fact I still could not manage my devastation in the context of everything else going on. The me from twenty years ago would look at the me today and understand. It felt like the one last thing I still had that I could count on — the final binding thread from there to now.
Nothing but forward from here. Hard work and commitment, but also sober wisdom that can only be gained from searing pain. That wisdom is the new thread that binds my timeline now. I am leaving the old Star Wars in the past, along with all of the rest of my old self I am dead to. Nowhere but up, and new. Further up and further in (as C. S. Lewis would say).
