The night I called the suicide hotline was a super wild night.
But first, a little background.
I left the U.S. Navy in December 1990 after eight years of service. It wasn’t easy to say goodbye. I had risen to the rank of Petty Officer First Class (E-6) as a Data Analyst (DA). I’d had a perfect performance eval (4.0) every year from the time I was a Petty Officer Third Class (E-4) to the time I got out. I received two Navy Achievement Medals, several commendation letters from Admirals, and was even named the “Best Analyst on the West Coast.” And when the Navy started to computerize, they hand-picked me out of all the other Data Analysts to join the team to computerize the entire Naval Aviation fleet and train the fleet on how to use it. This was my dream job, everything I had worked for and yet.
But I couldn’t stay. I was too mentally fucked up.
My trauma had started at a young age and it just continued from there. Which was kind of a blessing in a way, because my father was such a crazy psychopath, a physical and emotional abuser, that there really wasn’t anything in the Navy that could phase me. The girls in my Bootcamp kept asking me how I could take all the yelling and screaming. I would say, “This is just a lazy, Sunday afternoon conversation at my house.”
