The Michele Shocked song Anchorage came out the year I finished high school; at the time I was driving endlessly around Washington state, doing community organizing and resisting the urge to commit suicide. I had a random assortment of tapes in the car and that track was on one of them, though I do not recollect now if it was mine or something abandoned by one of my wounded friends.
A little over a year later I found myself standing next to the commissary on an army base in Alaska, a teenage bride clutching a baby, staring at a moose.
That song started playing in my mind, and it struck me quite forcefully that I was supposed to identify with the narrator, not the old friend.
I was an efficient and bureaucratic child: in an attempt to escape my fate, I obtained certificates from the appropriate experts stating that I was not allowed to live in Alaska. When the desired transfer was turned down I had my Senator intervene to bring the young husband home.
Military personnel and spouses will appreciate that this is a significant accomplishment, particularly given that I was only nineteen years old at the time.
I grew up in a military town, and I retain a fervent belief that our armed forces deserve a pay raise and better benefits. Even though I do not always agree with specific military campaigns I could have remained a military spouse without significantly challenging any of my core beliefs. I may look like a wildcat, but essentially I am an incrementalist who believes that appropriately managed government programs are the solution to most common problems.
The military also offers poor smart kids education, training, and durable skills they do not have the opportunity to gain elsewhere.
The feeling I had that day in Anchorage was not truly about Alaska, or the army, or any external factor. What I slowly realized over the course of two years, during which time I only lived with that boy for a few months, was that I was compromising my own integrity no matter where I lived.
I had settled – for someone who only loved me incidentally; for a shockingly meager paycheck; for a life without dreams. All because I needed health insurance, and he felt guilty.
That relationship ended, predictably and brutally, with an argument ostensibly about money that was really about two people realizing that they had squandered their youth.
I am inherently a responsible, practical person, and that has often been my downfall. It would be easy to allow myself to be trapped by the expectations and needs of other people, to sublimate myself to work, family, obligations.
I’ve spent the last eighteen years resolutely destroying the suicidal girl who stayed alive only because her testimony was required in a product liability suit.