Sometimes, you just need to vent.

Sometimes, it just feels good to let it all out. That's what my last post was about a few moments ago. I have, for the last year at LEAST, needed to just let this girl have it. Maybe some of my anger toward her isn't fair, maybe it's just pent up anger at other events that have happened these last 6 or 7 months, but there is honestly a LOT there to be angry at her for, and sometimes it just feels good to vent. I just started using this blog because I had posted a few things on my last one that I was not comfortable with everyone reading, so I guess I'll have to back up and explain a bit about the "last 6 or 7 months." 

        First of all, Jeff was wounded in combat in Afghanistan on February 16, 2011. Notification of that is something that I will never in this lifetime forget, much less all of the emotions that it kicks into gear. Our lives were turned completely upside down in a single moment, and we have been in Texas ever since, so he could recover. 

        On March 21st, he & I were out at the store to pick up a few things, and received a phone call where we were told our home was currently burning down. Yet again, in a single moment, everything was turned upside down, and we were going to have to start from scratch.

        Now that we've had time to get settled into a new place, life has slowly begun to slow down and we're working on regaining some sense of  "normalcy" in our everyday. With that, all these new emotions have begun to come out as well. On my part, it's a lot of feeling extremely blessed that Jeff walked away from an IED blast the day he was wounded, feeling lucky that none of us were back in Clarksville the day our home burned down. In the same breath, there's a lot, and I mean a LOT, of anger, that's come out as well. A lot of "why did all of this happen to US? What did we do to deserve all of these horrible things that have happened?" The only answer I have come up with is that the purpose of it has been to force us to realize how strong of a relationship Jeff & I have. I've never experience anything close to what has happened in these last months, and the fact that I have someone I can go to and cry & vent to, who understands everything and tries to understand everything that he doesn't....I absolutely love that I get to experience all of this craziness with this person who is both the love of my life and more importantly, my best friend. I don't believe we would be anywhere near as close as we are right now had these things not happened, and for that I am unbelievably thankful.

     But then I come back to this anger. I know it's awful to hate entire races of people, but I absolutely detest anything Muslim after what happened to Jeff. Any sense of empathy toward what happens to them, toward what happens to them in  their disgusting third world countries....that is completely gone. Do I care that we have men & women fighting in their countries and killing them because they can't take control for themselves and then they turn around and blame us and kill our soldiers? Absolutely. I care for each man & woman WE send over to fight these useless "people" who are incapable of doing nothing for themselves. It blows my mind that we send our people over to BETTER their disease-ridden country, and they do nothing but turn around and kill our soldiers. So do I care that they are dying everyday because they are too stupid and refuse to educate themselves to the point of being able to have a self-appointed goverment and a peaceful existence? Hell no. As ignorant as it may sound, I still say one big, well-placed bomb would be better than risking all of the American lives that we do just to be able to say "hey, we HELPED those people." And anyone who disagrees with that? Come to our house and listen to my love talk about his experiences over there in Iraq and Afghanistan, watch him struggle in dealing with the things he's seen and done in those places, watch how much he hurts when he talks about his friends who lost their lives because those Taliban "fighters" know nothing but violence, watch how angry some of those things make him and just how much it affects his day-to-day life.....and then tell me how much YOU would empathize with those people if you were in my place? I could try to be more open-minded to what goes on in the middle east, and the Muslim religion, but you know what? I don't feel any need to because of what I watch daily. So take that and think what you will of it, but that's my stance on the matter, and it will NOT change at any point in the foreseeable future. 

      There's a LOT of things I could sit here and choose to vent about, to be angry about. But at the end of the day, all I can really think of is how lucky I am that we are all still here. Does it make me angry that we lost our entire home to a fire? Absolutely. There were family mementos of both Jeff & I's that will never be able to be replaced. Does it make me angry that he has had and still has such a long recovery that he struggles with? Um......duh. I feel like I have no energy to deal with this stuff some days, honestly. It makes me angry at times to think that we had no say in us moving to Texas, and that some cowardly Taliban guy laid one halfway well-placed IED and dictated this change in our lives. But between him being wounded and the house fire, some days I look at it as 'well, I guess our slate has been wiped clean and we can start fresh.' That to me is a really good thing. I have this bad habit of being unable to let things go, of getting comfortable in certain routines and being afraid of diverting from those. This way, I've started trying new things I never would have before, of sort of stepping our of my personally set boundaries. I've gained a lot of confidence these last months that I'm not sure I would have ever gained otherwise. So when I think of what all has happened....I guess I tend to remember how blessed we are and how much I enjoy this crazy life that we've been given.