you deserve the opportunity to be free. west point makes you face so many hard realities about the way you want to live your life & it’s hard to explain that to someone who’s never experienced it first hand. attending west point means you are putting everything on hold…& when i mean everything, i mean EVERY.THING. your family won’t see you for extended periods of time, you’re forced to miss out on your friends’ celebrations & company, your significant others will have to wait for you on the other end of graduating, & you will have to put on hold all the plans you had that didn’t have west point as the centerfold of.
facing all of that is aching. waking up everyday knowing that each day is one day further from the last time you saw any piece of normality or the people you love. all of this makes people want to leave & go pursue other avenues; i honestly can’t blame them. sometimes, after the day is over & all the duties are done, my friends and i will talk about what they would do if they left west point. in the midst of conversation, i see little glimmers of hope & spurts of passion radiating from them as they talk about a life outside of green uniforms and away from these gray skies & endless formations.
sometimes the end results of west point are not enough to get people to stay, sometimes there are priorities in the real world that triumph staying here…& that’s okay. i’d be lying if i didn’t try & leave west point before ( & by try, i mean start applying to fsu again, scheduled meetings with my tac, & emailed fsu rotc again, begging them to take me back). it gets the best of us sometimes, & i don’t think there is enough sympathy or genuine understanding of why some people end of leaving west point.
i’ve had many of my friends leave west point & friends who are about to leave. i won’t lie, it pains my heart when they tell me their out processing paperwork has started. my heartbreaks is two-fold: 1) maybe it’s because usmaps is a very isolating place, but i feel so strongly for the people here & 2) i am jealous for their courage to commit to leaving, lord knows i don’t have that inside of me.
my first year here at west point is one of the most special years of my life because i live in the same building as the rest of my classmates. everyone i go to school with lives, worksout, and eats every meal in ONE SINGLE BUILDING. this is our first time experiencing west point & it’s a unique bond that directly admitted people to west point don’t really understand. When you come into usmaps, you start to fill in the people in that one building into your 57-month journey to graduation. It’s the same feeling I felt towards the people I started rotc with, but somehow, it’s different. You’re just constantly surrounded by these people that you have no choice but to see them through the highs & lows, & trust me, they will see you through yours too. There is very little privacy here, that you are exposed to the elements of people.
When you slowly see your friends you came in with start to weed away, you wonder if you’ll see them again (This is what I find different from my friends from rotc). I’m more than confident in my ability to see my rotc friends again because I’m lucky enough for the convenience of the majority of FSU students are usually Florida Natives & FSU is only a four hour drive from my mom’s house. West point, on the other hand, is a melting pot of people from ALL OVER THE NATION—I have friends from shores of Hawaii, the igloos of Alaska, the forests of California, the cities of Illinios, and the deserts of Texas & Arizona. The convenience of just stopping by to see them every once in a while disappears when they’re hometowns are in different time zones than my own.
When they leave New York, they may just become people in the stories I tell my friends back home or the stories I will someday tell my children. They may become people I love from a distance for the rest of my life unless we one day run into each other at an airport going from one side of the country to the other. The probability of me ever seeing them again just drops to a saddening amount, because life gets busy, careers get in the way, starting a family is time consuming, are there aren’t that many opportunities to drop everything to go see someone who lives 4,000 miles from you while being at West Point and after graduating. When my friends leave new York, I can’t predict when I will see them next; one day I knew what to say, but they won’t be there to hear it. Maybe, in between then and now, we can have one more meaningless conversation where the barracks of west point where the biggest problems we had, where finishing our homework and the struggles of waking up before the sun the next day were the grandest things we could complain about.
the other side of me is envious that they made it out. West point isn’t necessarily prison like, but instead, I like to compare it to a boujee rehabilitation center that Lindsey Lohan might’ve went to in the late 2000s. It’s not horrifying enough to be prison, but it definitely is isolating enough to make you believe you are a recovering addict to the outside world—it’s a very weird in-betweener that hurts my brain to explain. I want to go home so bad, it’s not even comical anymore. I miss the sun, my mom, my dog, my friends, and the freedom to do and be just about anything I want to do with my life. I miss the feeling of waking up every morning and thinking about what I might do, who I might see, and where I might go. West point just takes the “might” out of all the possibilities there could be. I know exactly what I’m going to do, who I will definitely be seeing, and where I will be going in the 18 hours I’m awake that day; it makes for a boring life in my opinion, but I’m just some girl on the internet.
There are people outside of west point who want me to come back to them, people who would rather see me everyday instead of twice a year, and people who love me enough to not want me to stay here because they see the life sucked out of me somedays. But then, there are people who know I can make through these 57-months like it was nothing, people who believe in my capabilities so much that they would vouch and cheer for me until they are blue in the face, and people who don’t want me to throw in the towel because they see the bigger picture, when all I want to see is the 50 meter target. These two sets of people live on either ends of my shoulders and some days I lean more to one side than another and other days I lean more in the opposite direction; I am so unsure of where I stand on the subject, that I just stay right here. I don’t believe that West Point isn’t for everyone, I think it can be fore you if you want it to be, but it comes with a ridiculous amount of grit, determination, and perseverance. Sure, going to west point isn’t some crazy ultra marathon that takes you through death valley when its 103 degrees outside, but the mental battle is just as grueling and just has hard to fight. I personally do not have it in me to leave anymore. I already went through the “I’m leaving” phase, and now I just live day by day, month by month, until one day I walk across that stage as a 25 year old second lieutenant. Some graduate with honors, but I think I will be just honored to graduate.
West point is long and taxing road and I understand those who have tried to water their grass here and it still ended up a gross shade of brown. Maybe the grass is greener wherever they may want to go, and while this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to some, they deserve the ability to go see if it is in fact greener; I got to see if the grass was greener on the west point side of the fence, so I think everyone deserves the chance to find out.
Everything is a once in a lifetime opportunity: west point is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, going to florida state at 18 was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, backpacking through Europe as a broke 20 year old is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, spending time with your family members while they’re still around is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and being happy at whatever stage you’re at is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I will miss the friends who pack up their belongings and leave west point, and pieces of them will stay with me. Their kindness, generosity, humor, and youth will stay with me for the years to come, hoping I will get to the age that I can tell stories about them to my kids one day. You’re not losing time, you’re doing what you’re doing. Whatever happens, this is time spent getting to better times.
to those who are about to embark on a life outside of west point. you will feel so alive again, like so incredibly alive. you are going to feel so alive that your cheeks hurt from smiling...these days are coming. may God be with you & lead you to those better times.
godspeed.
with all my love,
♡steff
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