Today’s blog is starting with a vocabulary lesson. “Shift” is an active, intentional move or change. “Drift” happens to us without effort (or, oftentimes, even awareness) on our part.
With that in mind, we aren’t talking about conscious changes to our identity—I’m going to start doing Pilates…stop eating meat…change my hair…quit my job, etc. This blog is all about what happens to us when we aren’t paying attention. Maybe it’s maturing; maybe it’s adapting; maybe it’s just growing into who we were always meant to be, but as I think (or at least hope) most can relate, current Kristi and the Kristi who entered into military spouse life are two very different people.
I’ve wasted a lot of time throughout the years wondering when I’d feel like myself again. When will things be back to normal? When will I feel normal again? If I could get five minutes with sweet little naïve 22-year-old me, I would tell her to let that go. With every move and milestone, we change. We can’t go back to who we were before any more than we can return to a duty station years later and expect the same experience.
And thank goodness! Each experience, each challenge, each duty station, deployment, PCS—each day even—has something to teach us. To learn that and absorb that is growth. We can’t (and shouldn’t, to be honest) try to be the old “us” who lacked that knowledge, that worldly experience.
So, what are these “experiences” I keep mentioning that change us without any conscious effort on our part? The big ones I can speak on from personal experience would be graduation, career changes, marriage, deployments, the birth of a child…then another, medical diagnoses, profound losses, moving, living overseas, military retirement. Maybe you’ve also felt your identity drift with these same changes. Maybe you’ve drifted in the wake of other major milestones.
But drifts can happen after subtle experiences too: traveling, befriending someone new, taking up a new hobby, learning a fun fact about lizards, finally keeping a garden alive, reading an impactful book, narrowly escaping an accident—truly anything.
The takeaway is this: I have had space to change. I still do, and so do you. Change isn’t always intentional, sometimes it happens without any help from us. And thank goodness because we’re busy taking care of everything and everyone else.
Military life isn’t meant to be spent in one place. It’s all the change that gets us where we’re supposed to be and makes us who we’re supposed to be.
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