The 10 year plan
Once upon a time, when I was a naive problematic 17 year old, I developed what I called the 10 year plan. I had fallen in love with an amazing guy when I was 16 and he was 20 and we stayed up late some nights talking about skydiving and kayaking the fjords of Norway and our endless bucket list, and music we loved and concerts we would have killed to go to and somewhere one day I wrote at the top of a blank google doc “The 10 Year Plan.”
Now this story reads like a fairy tale and I want to tell you all about it.
The 10 year plan frankly read like a card from cards against humanity; the one that says “Step one:________; Step two ____________ Step 3: Profit”
It said “Goals”
1) Go to college
2) Get a job
3) Open Cafe
4)Get married
5)Travel the world
Basic right? Well at least in my head it was better articulated. I wanted to go to college and get a business management degree. I planned to start saving up in college to open my business, and get a job in my field that would be lucrative enough to start my business. As for the business model, first I said cafe, then I wanted a restaurant, then I wanted a cafe by day, nightclub by night, then I wanted a cafe and bookstore, then I wanted a club, and well all in all that part was never concrete. But the husband part was. I had him, he was great, and though we had had our ups and downs he was mine and I was going to keep him forever.
But see the thing about life is that its always in flux. Just like my business model, the 10 year plan was vague and flexible. The famous French cinéaste Jean-Luc Goddard said that “every story has a beginning a middle and an end, not necessarily in that order,” and I find that to be the truth. I heard that quote for the first time in French 374 “Paris, Je T’aime” my 300 level french cinema and culture class, as I was working toward my degree. No, not my business degree, my French degree. Because life is not concrete, and I found when I started in economics that I’m crap at math and that business was a strict and regimented course to try and get into and that my love for the French language blossomed and made me happy when I was taking classes and so when it came time to declare a major, French Language and Composition was what I declared. Not business. Now I cant tell you the amount of compound interest your savings account with $736.77 in it will accumulate in 55 and a half years, but I can carry on a conversation with someone in another country about how their day was and their interests and ask for directions and watch movies from other countries, and so my beginning, my step one, even though it did not go as planned, still went.
So 1) Go to college. Check.
Now two years into my French degree, but really three since I was taking summer classes they restructured the curriculum at my college and my degree that I should have finished in 3 calendar years would have suddenly taken 5. My boyfriend, but then my fiance, and I started paying visits to a recruiter at the Air Force office, and as finances got tighter and I got tired of burnt hands and greasy hair and rude customers from my dead end jobs, his words started sounding sweeter and sweeter. He told me I weighed too much, and he was right, and I started going to the gym and fighting my body to lose the weight and 6 months and 15 pounds later I had, and suddenly my steps were out of order and I was eloping at an art gallery surrounded by 5 of my amazing friends and saying I do to the man I had been with since I was 16, the boy who taught me to play the cymbals (that’s another story for another day) and the hole between step one and profit became a productive military career that would fund the rest of my life.
And things didn’t go as planned, but 4) Get married. Check.
And 3 months after I married the love of my life they put me on a plane and they shipped me to Joint Base Lackland, San Antonio for Air Force Basic Training, and a week in I tripped off a curb and tore a muscle in my ankle, and I spent six weeks crying and going to physical therapy and fighting for the military to keep me, and not send me back home to try again later in 6 months, and after 6 weeks they sent me back to training and after 6 long painful crazy weeks I graduated and saw my husband for the first time in 14 weeks and it was the happiest and proudest I had been in years. They shipped me off to Tech School in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, not so lovingly nicknamed “Fort Lost in the Woods” since its in the middle of nowhere, and here I’ve been for another 9 weeks, with one more month left to go but you know what? I’m learning and getting more college credit and my husband and I are more financially stable than we’ve ever been and he leaves in two weeks for Lackland. Because when you make someone else part of a 10 year plan, your success as an individual does not matter at all if you do not have success as a whole and he’s doing well and he misses me and I miss him but I have so much faith in him that I have no doubts in my mind that he can and will succeed.
So 2) Get a job. Check.
Its been about three years since I wrote the 10 year plan, and though my steps are out of order, the few years since I graduated high school have gone amazingly. I am incredibly grateful for all of the amazing friends I have picked up along the way and the opportunities that I have had afforded to me. They constantly tell us at basic training that only 1% of the population of the US is fit for military service and that we need to be proud of our success and I am. I’m mindblowingly lucky to have a man I love and amazing friends and the opportunity for a military career and so I have to wonder as the character in book that already has an index page, what comes next.
We are all the protagonists of our own stories. This is mine. And I can’t wait for the next chapter to be written.
