What’s Next?

Most of you know that I just closed a huge chapter of my life. I am officially a veteran. The army has been my life for the past six years. Even since starting my life in a wheelchair, I’ve still been slaving away in the army. No matter how much I bitched and moaned about some of the typical government / military BS, I was and am still proud to have served. You just wouldn’t be a true enlisted soldier if you weren’t a little salty. So this begs the question, what’s next for me? 

Well first I have to reshape my goals. Before I was shot, I had humble and realistic goals. I was going to go to a tech college to get certified as a diesel mechanic and work back home in NH. The plan was in full motion as I crept my way out of the grip of Uncle Sam. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “the best laid plans of mice and men”. Here’s a new one for you... “bullet, meet spine”. 

At first I thought “okay, just give it a few weeks and my body will wake up. You’ll be back on your motorcycle and back to camping and running and shooting and closing your hands.” Well weeks turned into months and months turned into years. The whole time I just thought “what the hell do I do now? I’m just a crippled 23 year old with a high school diploma. I have friends that at one time I considered underclassmen in school that are getting their doctorate degrees. Here I am breathing on a machine and learning how to sit up on my own again.” I guess the better question is what can’t I do? 

Now I’m not going to throw out the term handicapable or anything like that. I follow a pretty solid spinal cord injury support group on social media and they motivate me a lot. Some of the people on there have similar injuries and they are able to do so much. I’ve said before that a lot of this injury is finding different ways to do things. It’s just adapting to life and rolling with the punches. Well I’m getting pretty sick of getting punched. It’s time for some action.

I made a new list of goals and a lot of them helped me bide some time while working my way into military retirement. I remember getting into Ranger Battalion as a young private and my squad leader had me make a list of goals. He wanted short term, intermediate goals and long term goals that I would have throughout the Army. He showed me good examples of each and I came up with a solid military check list. When I first started meeting with my psychologist to work through my injury, I asked her if she could help me create a new list of goals regarding my injury. My military leadership has been tracking my hit-list and have also helped me through it. That is a huge part of why they gave me my promotion to Sergeant (which was actually my long term goal that I made with my first squad leader back in 2013). 

I know that it seems like I’m tip-toeing around the ‘what’s next’ question. Truthfully, this blog is leading me into my next chapter. Once everything has settled down from my transition into the VA, I plan on taking Toast Master classes so I can improve on my public speaking skills (I mumble a lot). My main goal is to become an established motivational speaker to motivate others. Hopefully I will be able to balance that and some online classes because I definitely want a college degree (especially because the Army will cover it). So I guess that this is my ‘what’s next’.  

I still have a laundry list of goals to hit and typing them all out would be a bore for both of us. I guess that the moral of this short story from the Ballad of Josh and wheelchair is that life doesn’t slow down for anyone. There is always a ‘what’s next?’ scenario. Complacency is dangerous and goal setting is important no matter what the situation is. In other words... life keeps rolling. Thank you for reading!

God Bless!