Perhaps my greatest fear in life, besides contracting lice or discovering a family of spiders in my bed, is being completely and utterly unhappy. Often times this has led me to search for an escape route before I take on anything new, and ensure that I have a multitude of back up plans if something goes awry. Thus, I could have easily told you from a very young age that military life was not for me.

Halfway on my path to becoming an elementary school teacher I decided to jump ship and bail. After working in various schools and nannying for a plethora of little ones it wasn’t as if I had taken the decision to mold young minds lightly. I just realized somewhere along the line that I couldn’t commit to such a demanding profession for the rest of my working life.

Despite the dire statistics surrounding the state of marriage in the United States, I never really had friends with divorced parents when I was growing up. We all trusted that our parents would be one unit for as long as we needed them to be and as far as I can remember none of us ever feared that they would decide to go their separate ways. Luckily, we each got to the other side of adolescence with the same amount of stability that we entered with.

After a week filled with enough democrat vs. republican tension to make my skin crawl, I was made blatantly aware of the fact, once again, that my significant other and I are on the complete opposite sides of the political spectrum. With five years behind us and a general tendency to avoid such issues I thought that maybe things might have changed a bit. Like we might still be on different sides of the fence but there was no longer acres of land between us. Turns out, I was a little wrong. Ok, a lot wrong.

Sometimes I look at my cute -as-a-button one-year-old niece and wish with all my might that I was her. That looking outside was able to make me giddy with excitement and opening my mouth at inopportune moments to allow half chewed food out was actually acceptable. I wish that I couldn’t stand to sit for more then a few seconds because there was just too much to explore.

After schleping my prized possessions into a storage unit about two years ago, I reluctantly moved back in with my parents. In my mind this stint at home would last only a few months while I found a way to magically expand my bank account- so I brought just what was necessary to comfortably survive. I even endured a year of my dad’s poster of Paul McCartney hanging above my bed in order to reiterate the fact that yes, I had every intention of high tailing it out of there asap.

Vodka and I have never been very good friends. From the first time I dry-heaved through an entire cup sans chaser (sometime too early in my adolescence to be even remotely appropriate) I knew that anytime vodka came on the scene there would be trouble. We managed to patch things up on a few occasions- once enough time had passed for me to forget how I had been wronged- but somehow the outcome was always the same: me draped over the toilet willing the last few hours to miraculously reverse themselves. Not a pretty picture.

As an opinionated 20-something equipped with a generous amount of confidence, I would like to believe that my voice could never be muddled by any sort of relationship. But weathering the storms of a long-distance five year relationship has taught me that always sticking to my guns and shouting to be heard is generally not the most productive route to take.