there is a place for me in the military, apparently. so they say. or, so this one guy said one time. i was told, by this dude, that my capacity for awareness of what’s going on around me is actually a desirable skill, one that is useful for the military.

my partner and i were dining with this fellow and his wife, at a restaurant we’d never been to before, and someone at the table mentioned some item on the menu that sounded interesting. i replied that i’d noticed someone being served that dish as we were being led to our table by the host, that the guy over my left shoulder wearing a Tom Brady jersey was probably still eating the thing right now, if they wanted to take a look. the husband (part of the military himself, holding some really specialized position that i never really was able to understand) immediately diagnosed me as possessing excellent situational awareness, which is, basically, exactly what it sounds like: “the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their future status.” he explained that people who have the ability to observe and process environmental information at a really high level (which he had determined, from the fact that i noticed what some guy was eating in a restaurant, i had the ability to do) were very valuable, because they could analyze situations and make recommendations about how and when to take actions. the example he gave was watching a bunch of shops, where there was suspected terrorist activity. someone with this skill might notice that a particular customer who comes in every morning around 9am is absent one day, which might be meaningful and help prevent the loss of life (by, you know, probably causing the loss of someone else’s life).

it actually reminded me of one of my first appointments with my first therapist. i can’t remember what we were talking about, but she stopped and asked me to close my eyes. she said that she did this all the time with clients, asking them to tell her everything they could remember about the room we were in, explaining that, usually, people were unable to describe the room accurately at all and couldn’t recall any correct details. it was an exercise, i think, to illustrate something about how out of touch we actually are with ‘reality,’ showing that we can’t even describe a room that we’re currently sitting in. i’m not totally sure if that was the goal, but what i do remember is that i fucking crushed it, rattling off the smallest details about things like the brand of computer monitor she had and the names of the board games stacked up on a small shelf by the door. she stopped my inventory of the office, remarking that she’d never had anyone answer this challenge so thoroughly and accurately, and i felt sufficiently good about myself (while she, no doubt, adjusted her still-forming understanding of how and why i’m a fucking disaster). recalling that episode felt like some kind of confirmation of this military dude’s assessment of my ability to assess.

so i guess i got that to fall back on. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯