For the first 4 years of this blog – I expected that my medically dictated retirement would come. I dabbled in thinking about “growing up and getting a real job” because it wasn’t truly on my real horizon. I knew it was coming – it was just so far away.
Well….. crap.
Now I think I am behind schedule.
I have started looking at the fine print details of my medical release… some things, don’t work out so well in the best case scenarios – which means – I can’t have everything my way.
The reality is – I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. So how do I decide what to do?
The first hurdle is that my “military insurance company” SISIP – (service Income Security Insurance Plan) has a pot of money I can use. Its part of the long term disability (because I am being medically released from the military) style program that I have paid into for 30 years.
So, I want to spend that money, and have a 2 year window to do so.
But what to do?
The biggest fear upon leaving the military is based on my trade skills. There aren’t many companies looking for people skilled in the fine art of tactical coordination, designed for the delivery of explosives upon a unseen target, based on calculations from underwater acoustic information.
My other skills are less tangible. Not everyone can say they have earned their badges in PowerPoint like many of us have. I am sure those skills could make me money – right?
Little bit of a rabbit hole here –
I actually thought for awhile I should become an advocate, writer, or a pundit about military affairs. Maybe just the nutbar that the local TV station calls to get a contrarian opinion, so I come across as the axe grinding cranky pants (yes, I have used that term before).
I was thinking my powerpoint skills, military background, and having a blog, could make me like Angry Staff Officer – I get kick out of his twitter handle (if you don’t get it – you probably haven’t done much staff work). I used my blog to find out if I can at least write in a mediocre fashion, before I try to branch out into better avenues of content creation. Knowing others can do it, have done it – made me wonder about it.
I have a plan to still do stuff like that – but it is secondary to my plans right now. Reality – I will probably always dabble and daydream about making money from a website, but I won’t commit to trying to get rich from it just yet.. one step at a time first.
The challenge becomes – how do decide what to do? I have spent hours on many educational institution websites looking at a number of programs. I have taken a large number of online questionnaires and surveys that spit out the answers of what “I should be”. Then I research some more.
I feel like its “analysis paralysis”. Do I have enough information to make a properly educated decision about the rest of my life? My mind says no …. Because I don’t have something smacking me in the face to say “do this”.
I have some great ideas though, which I am investigating more specifically. Working quickly now, as I need to finalize some decisions, potentially in the next 2 months.
In future posts, I will talk about some of the programs I am looking at, and why.
I will comment on how I think my military training that might make me valued in that field.
GENERAL UPDATES
So, my scope is coming up next month. Little nervous due to energy, work, and stress levels.
The office work is way harder than I expected. I am finding the mental challenges draining, and I find it frustrating that it is taking my brain so long to get back to where the level of capability I believe I used to be. The physical strain is exhausting as my body doesn’t recover energy as well as I hope, so I seem perpetually tired.
I am finding challenges towards writing more, I have some big ideas – just no time to implement them. It is quite frustrating. I have paused some things I thought I would have better traction on. My notebook has lots of ideas and concepts started, but the time to action anything, seems to be the challenge.
November is has been a tough month. Several anniversaries of lost friends, and a close friend heard the words “You have Cancer” .
2019 has just gone by so fast.
Anyway, that is enough for now.
Thanks for reading this far.
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I do want to write more often – I should work on writing more, short posts…… its a plan, I just need to implement it.
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