Write about an event...

I wrote this as part of a psychology experiment. It asked me to describe a potentially life changing experience in the past three years.

"The experience I will describe is a slightly traumatic one in the sense that it threw me entirely out of my comfort zone and forced me to develop emotional independence. I am speaking of my being conscripted into the army for "national service" in my home country, after my A levels. This was about two and a half years ago and i was due to serve for two years. Certainly many of my peers disliked having their time appropriated from them by the state, but most accepted it grudgingly, presumably because it did not affect their emotional lives too deeply. My dislike for the army life stemmed from two major problems, firstly my need for copious amounts of privacy and 'alone time', and secondly my lack of affinity for the craft of soldiering.

Of course, in an environment where value is placed on specific physical competencies (eg. reflexes) and the ability to establish a camaraderie that facilitates teamwork with anyone and everyone, failure to live up to expectations, or perceived failure to do so, did affect my sense of self-worth and fed back to the habit of asking "what am I doing here?". The complete rupture from an academic environment as a student, - which to be honest, I believe I have grown too comfortable with for my own good - where conformity to an entirely different set of social expectations (eg. attitudes and values of manliness, loyalty to your platoon) made me feel terribly oppressed and disconnected. That is, the army environment not only prevented expression of individuality; it required active effort to display your conformity in terms totally contrary to my inclinations which I found extremely draining. On retrospect, I see that my sense of my disconnect from the environment, and the very unhappy states due to my complete inability to satisfy my emotional needs in relation to that environment, made me project wishes of being a free person as a sort of coping mechanism, which therefore started to elicit a habit of bitter complaining. It was certainly not the activities alone which I resented; some of them are actually remembered with a surprising amount of ambivalence. The issue was more to do with the people involved. For example, during training, being shouted at was common, but when it reaches a certain stage of frequency and intensity, for things like failing to greet your superiors, it becomes extremely exhausting. Essentially, one needs to recover after all this by a good deal of alone time, at least by my book.

Now, this is made really bad by the second problem of the total lack of emotional recovery time, of time when you can feel alone. When you stay in a 12 person bunk of your section mates, it simply means that you have zero time to just feel yourself. Why do I need such time? What does it help me do? Well, it is a form of engaging with yourself, of introspective reflection, and more importantly of feeling your own thoughts, and I require a daily dose of that for emotional health. I guess one can apply the analogy of a lover in love with myself, specifically the reflective part of myself, and without the opportunity to interact emotionally with this part, I will be pretty unhappy, and lonely.

So how did I cope with this? Well, I'm not sure that I did very well. But essentially one just goes through the training stage and then gets sent to the unit. When I got a unit role, i faked a knee injury and was sent to an administrative depot, where could leave after work, similar to an office setup. Things improved greatly after that.

What is the significance of this episode? I believe these stages very much established the mould of my emotional habits and character. That is, I became convinced of my different, and uncommon psychological needs and grew pretty cynical about the ability of others to understand me - which sounds strangely adolescent. Also, I think it was then that I began to conceive of the separation of the private and public me in absolute terms and in terms of effort did really let drop the public image. That is, I became established in the inclination to think that me, my world, matters so much more than all your worlds, and that communitarian world, that strange, interwoven ambitious world, teeming with desperate engagements (drunk in the delight of its own terrible uncertainty), full of absolute assumptions; the real world. I think alot of my adulthood would actually revolve around the development, or else the slow eroding, of these basic assumptive positions in the way I approach my life."