identity – Muddled Soma

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Unfinished, Yet Worthy – Day 51

February 14, 2026February 16, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Who You Thought You Were Becoming

Reading through old college papers this past weekend felt like opening a time capsule written by someone who believed becoming was a destination instead of a motion. Every paper held a version of me trying to decide who deserved to exist long enough to grow. The theme was always the same regardless of the assignment. The theme was simply becoming. I wanted the chance to stay somewhere long enough for roots to allow something to grow.

Growing up between bases meant growth was temporary and stunted. I learned to adapt faster and grow shallow rather than deep. Peace at all costs became the unspoken rule, which meant parts of me stayed small so the room could stay quiet. I tried on identities the way other kids tried on jackets. Some fit for a season. Some fit well enough to almost feel true. But none stayed long enough to mature into anything stable.

What I wanted most was not a specific identity. I wanted permission to become something recognizable. I believed everyone else had already arrived somewhere solid while I kept circling the runway waiting for clearance to land. I thought if I chose the right role, did the right thing, performed the right version of myself, then maybe love would return, conversations would reopen, and I would finally be seen as someone worth staying for. The moment never came, at least it was not a moment.

Becoming did not announce itself with applause or resolution. It stretched across years instead. It took me across oceans to Japan where silence felt honest for the first time. It carried me into Rwanda where history sat heavy in the air and made my own questions feel smaller and sharper at the same time. It placed me at tables with presidents where power felt strangely human, almost fragile. It sat me in pubs glowing with warm wood and laughter where friendship felt less like performance and more like breath. It led me into churches that promised healing yet left echoes of harm that took years to untangle.

I still have not crossed a finish line; rather, I am content with standing in the space where old versions of me linger while new ones are still learning how to breathe. Past and present speak at the same time, asking different questions with the same voice. Clarity never arrived the way I expected; instead, I know becoming is not a destination. The person I thought I was becoming dissolved somewhere along the way of me actually becoming him. What remains is not fixed, but rather a life being lived. I am less interested now in arriving and more willing to stand in the in between, where memory, grief, and possibility sit side by side and refuse to resolve into anything simple. And for the first time, my worth is mine. It is no longer measured by who stayed or who left; it is measured by the simple fact that I am still here, still becoming, and no longer apologizing for taking up space.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Identity: Annotated in the Margins – Day 50

February 13, 2026February 15, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Outgrowing an identity.

I wrote the paper I mentioned in my previous post before I knew I was actually beginning to draw a map. Back then I thought I was explaining two people, Rodney and Lj, like they were characters in a story. One careful. One loud. One polite enough to be invited to dinner. One reckless enough to laugh at the invitation. I thought I was making sense of opposites. I did not realize I was documenting my survival up to that point.

Rodney was the name that arrived first. It came with expectations and rules and the quiet understanding that good children did not take up too much space. Rodney knew how to observe, how to blend, how to make himself acceptable in rooms that did not always feel safe. Rodney watched more than he spoke. Rodney carried the weight of being seen as good because being good felt like protection.

Lj came later, but he felt older somehow. He showed up in locker rooms and late conversations and moments when the rules stopped making sense. Lj said what Rodney swallowed. Lj used language like a blade and a bridge at the same time. He did not wait for permission. He did not soften edges just to make others comfortable. Back then I called him the “bad” extreme. Now I think he was just more authentic and honest.

Reading that old paper now feels like opening a time capsule written by someone who knew more than he admitted. I can hear the younger version of me trying to organize identity into categories; good versus bad, reckless versus respectable, loud versus quiet. He needed the world to be that simple because he had not yet learned that both voices were trying to keep him alive.

The truth is that Rodney and Lj were never enemies. They were translators for each other. Rodney understood the cost of words; Lj understood the cost of silence. Rodney held the map; Lj lit the match. Somewhere between the two, a writer started to form.

I think about how often I moved as a kid, how every new base felt like an invitation to reinvent myself. Identity was never fixed; it was something I packed in a suitcase and tried on again when the walls changed. That paper captured the moment when I first noticed that reinvention had a pattern. I did not become someone new; I just shifted which part of me was allowed to speak.

There is something tender about the younger voice calling Lj loved or hated but never ignored. I hear a kid trying to make sense of visibility after years of practicing invisibility. He did not yet know that being seen would come with its own kind of grief, that every word spoken out loud would echo longer than expected.

What surprises me most is not how different I sound now, but how familiar that voice feels. The metaphors were already there. The obsession with language was already there. Even the quiet awareness that identity was not a single story but a conversation between versions of myself had already begun.

Maybe this happen when returning to old pages; not to correct them, but to recognize the person who was brave enough to start writing before he knew where the story was going.

Rodney is still here. He always will be. He is the part of me that pauses before speaking, the part that listens for the unsaid. Lj is still here too, louder now, less interested in apologizing for taking up space. They no longer feel like extremes. They feel like witnesses to each other.

If I could speak to the kid who turned that paper in, the one who received a modest grade and moved on, I would tell him this: you were not describing two personalities. You were describing the beginning of a voice that would take decades to understand itself.

And maybe that is the real battle. Not outgrowing Rodney or Lj or any other identity, but learning how to let them all sit at the same table without one trying to replace the others. But seriously, a C-? WTF!

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Breadcrumbs of Identity – Day 49

February 12, 2026February 15, 2026 ljandkari1 Comment

Prompt – Trying on Identities

Identity was never a fixed address. Like moving to a new air base, my identity could shift without warning. If one piece of me did not work at this base, I could always try something new at the next one. New school. New hallway. New version of myself walking in before I even knew who I was supposed to be there. Each new place offered another identity, or at least another mask that helped me survive long enough to figure things out.

Some identities arrived assigned and had little to do with my choice. The smart kid. The quiet kid. The redheaded kid. The husky kid. Labels handed out like Oprah handed out cars. I wore them because they were already waiting for me when I showed up. Other identities were experiments. I tried on invisibility first. It felt safe, like maybe shit would hurt less if I stayed small and unnoticed. That identity lasted longer than most and followed me well into adulthood. But invisibility came with a cost. It protected me from harm, yet it also kept me from being fully seen, even by myself.

College was the first time I realized identity could be rewritten on purpose. I remember writing a paper about it, splitting myself into two voices. Rodney was the rule follower, the kid who survived by staying small and predictable. Lj was the observer, the writer, the one willing to question things even when it pissed people off. I did not know it then, but that paper was less about names and more about giving myself permission to exist in more than one way at the same time.

I tried on other identities too. The class clown. The artist. The writer. The badass. The observer. Each version carried risk. Writing meant stepping out of hiding and leaving proof behind. Observing meant noticing patterns that others preferred to ignore. Being the badass let me channel anger that had nowhere else to go, but there was too much anger for everyone, including me.

Looking back, trying on identities was never about pretending to be someone else. It was a quiet form of survival, a way to test the edges of who I could become without losing the parts of me that refused to disappear through all the moves. Some identities were armor. Some were escape routes. Some were honest attempts at becoming whole. But none of them were wasted. They were breadcrumbs left by a younger version of me who did not yet have the experience to know what the hell I was searching for. I do not see those versions as mistakes. They were thresholds. Thin places where one version of me ended and another began, often without ceremony. Identity was never a single choice. It was a slow accumulation of selves, layered over time, until the noise faded enough for me to recognize the one voice that had been there all along, steady and patient, waiting for me to stop trying to become someone else and finally allow myself to arrive.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Transactional Reflections – Day 47

February 10, 2026February 14, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – The Mirror Years

Mirrors. Another world reflected back, distorted in ways that felt both familiar and foreign. I was never obsessed with the mirror during the mirror years because the distortion was too great to trust. The mirror did not lie exactly, but it never told the whole truth either. It caught my outline but fully missed my context. It held my image still while everything inside me kept shifting.

It is not that I did not care about what I looked like. I cared deeply. I already knew what I looked like because others made sure to tell me. Classmates narrated my appearance while adults tried to soften it with other words, and like the mirror, neither kids nor adults told the whole story.

During those years, I learned to approach the mirror like my family approached houses; transactional in nature. A quick glance to adjust my shirt and then move on. Staying too long invited comparison, and comparison always felt rigged from the start. Red hair, pale skin, and a spare tire around my waist was a hard hand to win with. I stood there sometimes wondering if the person looking back was fixed or temporary, just like the house I lived in for that year.

I guess there was a strange relief in not being obsessed because obsession requires belief. I did not fully believe in the real me or the reflection. However, there were still moments when I lingered longer than planned. Not to admire or to criticize, but to study my real smile versus the one I performed to keep the peace. Those moments felt like secret conversations that no one else could interrupt. The mirror was less about appearance and more about listening.

Of course, the mirror did not give answers and as I mentioned, it was never really about how I looked. It became a quiet witness instead. I learned that my reflection was not asking to be corrected. It was asking to be seen without the noise of everyone else’s language layered on top of it. Through the distortion and my doubt, if I stood there long enough to feel the weight of my own presence, something steadier began to surface. Not confidence. Not certainty. Just recognition.

Eventually I stopped asking the mirror to tell me anything at all. I stood there less often, and when I did, I looked without searching for meaning. The reflection remained incomplete, and maybe it always will be. What changed was not the image, but my willingness to leave it unfinished. I learned that understanding does not always arrive with resolution. Sometimes it arrives as a quiet acceptance that the person in the glass is only one version of the story, and that the rest of me exists somewhere just beyond its frame, moving forward even when the reflection stays behind.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

A Different Brand of Baggage – Day 45

February 8, 2026February 13, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Learning what “cool” meant.

Cool, according to younger me, was all about visibility. As someone who had created an entire science and creed around being invisible, confidence and cool had everything to do with being perceived or seen as cool, with the key being seen. I was not cool, or so I thought at the time. I was the kid who followed the rules not just to follow them, but so others would leave me alone long enough for me to be by myself. Later, quietly and often in private, I bucked the system in smaller ways by reading, writing, and thinking – so cool, I know! Somewhere inside all of that, I was cool; however, I did not believe it then and neither did the crowd that measured such things.

As a military kid moving every time the base commander sneezed or shifted the wind, I watched cool from the sidelines before I ever tried to step into it. Each new school carried its own language, its own hierarchy, its own unwritten rules about who mattered and why. There were a few universals about sports and money, but every place crowned a different tribe, and the traits that defined them did not always match the last place. Still, that tribe always seemed untouchable. They walked into a room as though the room had been waiting for them all along. I walked in hoping to pass unnoticed. Red hair, my weight, and my own doubts made invisibility nearly impossible, so I studied cool long before I allowed myself to imagine becoming it.

At first, I believed cool meant rebellion and risk. The kid who talked back. The group that laughed too loudly in the cafeteria. They looked fearless, and fearlessness felt like the opposite of everything I carried. I stayed small, stayed agreeable, stayed quiet enough to avoid friction. Inside, though, something restless kept pressing forward. Every time I watched someone question an adult or challenge a rule that did not make sense, I felt admiration tangled with envy. They looked free, even though many of them were simply bound to a different kind of baggage.

It took years to understand that what I had been seeing was not freedom; it was performance. And sometimes it was armor. The loudest rebellion rarely held the deepest courage. I began to notice “real cool” in quieter acts. The student who asked a thoughtful question when everyone else stayed silent. The friend who told the truth even when it complicated things. The teacher who admitted uncertainty and invited the class into the work of figuring it out together. Those moments did not look cinematic or dramatic, yet they felt grounded in something honest…something cool.

Cool stopped being about defiance and became more about authenticity. It became the willingness to show up fully, even when that meant standing alone for a moment. The people I came to respect as cool were not trying to be different; they were simply refusing to disappear because of their difference.

Looking back, I see that my definition of cool was always tangled up with belonging. I thought cool meant breaking rules because I believed that was the only way to be noticed. What I know now is quieter and more complicated. Cool is not the volume of rebellion; it is the clarity of self. It is the slow decision to speak when silence would be easier. It is the courage to ask questions, not to disrupt for attention, but to understand more deeply.

Somewhere along the way, watching from the edges, I began to ask my own questions. Not loudly. Not in ways that made a scene. Just enough to feel the ground shift under my own feet. Cool stopped looking like rebellion and started feeling like recognition. The loudest people in the room were not always the freest; many of them were just better at hiding their fear in plain sight. What I had once called invisible was never absence. It was observation. It was patience. It was a boy learning how to belong to himself before belonging to any crowd. And maybe that is what cool finally became; not a performance to be witnessed, but a quiet agreement between who I was and who I no longer needed to pretend to be.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Not a Replica, Just an Edit – Day 44

February 7, 2026February 13, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Something you secretly liked about how you looked.

I spent most of my childhood avoiding pissing people off and staying small and out of the way, and this included staying out of the way of myself. After Alaska, mirrors were no longer friends as I was now “husky,” as the adults called it. I wanted to disappear inside my body that seemingly refused to cooperate. My carrot top red hair walked into the room before I did. Adults called it distinctive. Kids made fun of that distinction. Still, if I am being honest, I secretly liked my hair, just not the color.

It was thick and styled well. There was no strange cowlick that other kids had to use water, gel, and frustration to tame. My hair always cooperated. It feathered and fell into place without much effort, the kind of easy that felt unfair compared to how hard everything else seemed. I complained about the color, but damn, at least it had possibility. Even under certain light it shifted, less fire and more copper, almost calm. My hair belonged to me and not to the people doing the teasing. That realization felt like a small act of rebellion, the kind that stayed hidden in plain sight with a subtle middle finger to all. I hated the attention of my carrot top, but I still appreciated the way my hair moved when I turned my head. That contradiction lived quietly inside me, a private agreement that I would never admit out loud.

My nose was also a feature I secretly liked, but for a different reason. It was not the sharp line and hard angle of my father’s nose. My nose curved differently. There was no harsh slope, no rigid echo of authority staring back at me from the mirror. As a tween and teen, the mirror confirmed that I was not a replica of my father. I was an edit. Hope lived in that small difference. Liking my nose meant I did not have to inherit everything. I could carry pieces forward and leave others behind. That thought stayed with me longer than any insult about my hair ever did.

There were moments when I stood longer than necessary in front of a mirror, dissecting my reflection. I would pretend to adjust something that did not need fixing, knowing I was really searching for proof that I belonged, if nowhere else, at least to myself. I did not feel confident about who I was, but I was damn sure curious about who I was not becoming. Maybe that was the beginning of rebellion; not loud or reckless, just a slow refusal to disappear. Even when I tried to stay small, parts of me kept stepping forward first, red hair and all, as if they already understood what I was still learning; that becoming someone new does not begin with change, it begins with noticing the pieces that were quietly mine all along.

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change/Uncategorized

Ginger, Interrupted – Day 43

February 6, 2026February 12, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Something about your appearance you struggled with.

I hated my red hair as a kid. My parents always framed it like it was a blessing, as though it was some strange cosmic DNA secret upgrade that unlocked every fourth generation. They said it was rare. They said it made me memorable. They said it like I was chosen; however, I felt as though I was exposed because kids never called it rare. Kids could see my flaming red hair and used it as target practice.

Carrot Top. Big Red. Fire starter. Every nickname made sure I knew I was different. Houses changed often in the military with new classrooms and new people, but the insults never were new because the hair stayed the same. Somehow those that slung the insults thought they were original poets that uttered the insult at me first. Not the brightest bulbs in the pack, but still difficult to ignore.

Like most gingers, my skin sure as hell did not help matters. I was pale in a way that felt almost unfinished, like I had been sketched and colored in by the white Crayola crayon. Twenty-four seconds in the sun turned me into a walking warning label for future skin cancer prevention. Freckles multiplied overnight and merged together like some ancient protection rune drawn across my face and shoulders. Adults called them cute angel kisses. I called them evidence that a host of angels took a shit all over me.

There were moments I tried to negotiate with my red hair and fair skin. They always won. So I found myself standing just out of reach of direct sunlight. I watched other kids tan into some version of confidence that felt foreign to me. I was either white or lobster, a permanent contrast against whatever landscape I happened to live in that season. I wanted invisibility more than anything. I wanted to look like everyone else long enough to walk through a hallway without hearing insults.

Time did what time does. It softened some edges, sharpened others, and still others faded. Somewhere between leaving childhood and stepping into adulthood, the hair I tried to outrun began to feel less like a spotlight and more like a marker as it faded into auburn. It carried the memory of “carrot top” with it, but it turned out to be a good color. The freckles stopped feeling like a flaw and started to feel like a map of where I had been.

I still catch my reflection sometimes and see the kid who wished for darker hair, darker skin, anything that might let him disappear into the background noise of a hallway. He thought blending in would make him safe. He thought invisibility meant peace. What he did not know was that standing out would one day become a quiet kind of permission. The thing that made me feel exposed also trained my eyes to notice the other kid carrying something visible they never asked for. Different hair. Different language. Different body. Same feeling.

The red faded into auburn over time, softer at the edges, less fire and more ember. The freckles stopped feeling like a flaw and started to feel like coordinates, small constellations mapping where I had been rather than where I failed to belong. I stopped negotiating with the mirror. I stopped trying to outrun a color that had already outrun me.

I hated my red hair for years. Now it feels less like an accident and more like handwriting. Not a super power. Not a curse. Just a mark that stayed when everything else kept moving. And maybe that is what growing up really is. Learning that the parts of me I tried hardest to erase were never asking to be loved loudly. They were only asking to be allowed to stay.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Under the Square Light – Day 42

February 5, 2026February 12, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt: The First Time I Became Aware of My Body

I was young, maybe three years old. Dates blur as much as addresses when life moves from base to base, so I cannot swear to the age. We had just moved again. New walls with new sounds. New shadows stretching across a room that did not yet belong. I woke in the middle of the night needing to take a leak. I do not remember the urgency itself, only the pattern; as a child, every trip to the bathroom felt like an emergency because children wait until the last possible moment.

I remember standing on cold, ugly linoleum and flipping the light switch on. The bathroom filled with that sudden brightness from the generic square fixture that lived in every room of base housing…wide, practical, square glass that never changed unlike the people in the house. I saw only the top of my head at first. Then I adjusted, lifted myself higher on the step stool, and there I was. A body. A somebody?

I talked to myself. Not in full sentences, just sounds and small words. I moved my mouth and my arms and watched them both follow my instructions. I turned sideways. I leaned closer to the mirror from the step stool. I remember feeling both surprised and completely certain at the same time. That was me. I could talk. I could move. I could do things. The awareness had nothing to do with my looks. It was about my agency. I was something inside this shape I was seeing in the mirror that obeyed me. It felt like discovering a toy I had always owned but had never played with until now.

Years later, a different type of body awareness arrived, and it was nothing like that first quiet moment in the mirror. The awareness did not come from me. It came from others. From glances that lingered too long. From jokes that sounded like laughter but felt like measurement. My body became something public before I understood it privately. I learned what I looked like through other people’s reactions long before I learned what I felt like inside my own skin.

At three, the mirror gave me independence with possibility. It was movement and voice in a body that could carry whatever story I wanted to tell. Later, the world handed me a different mirror. One that reduced me to my weight and size. One that suggested my body was something to manage, something to correct, something to explain. Both moments were awakenings.

What I know now, years later, is that neither version was the whole truth. The child in the bathroom mirror was right. The body was never a problem to solve. It was a place to live. A place to feel safe enough to grow, even when growth looked messy or uncomfortable or misunderstood.

Sometimes I think back to that kid standing in the bathroom, talking to himself like he had discovered a secret language. He did not yet know about weight or judgment or how easily a body becomes a story other people try to write for you. He only knew that he was there, awake inside his own reflection, testing what it meant to exist.

And maybe that is the first real awareness. Not the shape of the body, but the quiet recognition that someone is living inside it, watching, learning, waiting to decide which stories belong and which ones can be set down.

The mirror did not give me answers that night. It only gave me a beginning. And beginnings, I am learning, are often small, incandescent, and easy to miss until years later when the light finally makes sense.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Left at the Base Gate – Day 41

February 4, 2026February 8, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – What friendship meant then versus now.

Friendship for a Gen X military brat was never abstract. It was immediate, physical, and temporary. It lived on a base for a season. It was whoever arrived where I landed and stayed until the orders changed things. Closeness did not require history because the history was already baked into the coming and going. It required only shared space and a shared understanding that the now mattered.

Moves arrived without negotiation. One day there were no boxes, and the next day there were boxes. No one framed it as loss. It was logistics. Adults talked about duty and opportunity while kids learned how to say goodbye without ceremony. Grief did not get named or recognized, so it learned how to hide. It was hella efficient.

That efficiency shaped all parts of life including friendship. I learned how to read people and rooms quickly. I learned which parts of myself to lead with and which parts to keep packed. I learned how to belong without attaching too deeply because attachment always came with a cost that would be collected later. Leaving did not mean the friendship was not real. It only meant it had run its course.

There was a raw honesty in those friendships. There was no time for slow reveals or performative closeness. We went deep because the clock was already ticking. Loyalty was not measured in years. It was measured in moments by who stood next to me right then, and who kept my secrets when it mattered.

Years later, Japan reinforced that lesson in a quieter way. Friendship there came with an expiration date written directly into the contract. One year, sometimes two. The system itself discouraged permanence, as if rotation could prevent attachment from taking root. It felt almost sacred, like impermanence was a value worth protecting. I understood the rule. I broke it anyway.

In Japan, friendship was full and immediate. We did life together knowing it would end. There was no pretending otherwise. That honesty made the closeness sharper. We shared meals, mistakes, and small triumphs without the illusion of forever. When the goodbyes came, they were clean, even when they hurt like hell. The ending did not erase what had been real. Then time moved on, and the rules of friendship shifted again.

Adult friendship now is persistent and networked. It lives in texts, threads, and long digital echoes. Distance no longer explains disappearance. Silence gets interpreted. Absence becomes personal. Continuity is expected, even when life makes that continuity hard.

For someone raised where friendship ended cleanly at the base gate, this can feel disorienting. The instinct to give space can read as withdrawal. The habit of packing light can look like detachment. What once kept me steady can now feel out of step. And yet, something endures.

That upbringing left behind a particular strength. The ability to go deep without guarantees. The capacity to choose people deliberately rather than by convenience. A sensitivity to character, to kindness, to how someone treats power and vulnerability. There are fewer friendships now, perhaps, but the ones that remain carry real weight.

There is also a fluency in difference. I learned how to translate myself across places, cultures, and expectations. I learned that belonging is not automatic, but it is possible. That skill does not disappear. It matures. What can look like guardedness is often discernment. What can look like distance is often respect for the truth that closeness should be intentional. Friendship was never something I assumed would last forever. It was something I honored while it was true.

And maybe that is the quiet gift. Knowing that connection does not require permanence to be real. Knowing that love can be fierce and temporary and still shape a life. Knowing that when I choose to stay now, it is not because I have to. It is because I mean it.

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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Cheese Metal Belonging – Day 38

February 1, 2026February 1, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

Prompt – Inside jokes that felt like belonging.

Chris and I played baseball on the base league at Plattsburgh Air Force Base. He went to a private Catholic school in town, and sports leagues on base were one of the only organized ways we were able to spend time together outside of our South Side Trails adventures. When one of our baseball seasons ended, we decided to extend that sense of belonging and proximity into a new sport. Soccer. Oh Jesus. Soccer meant crossing over the tracks to the old base, where most of the officers’ kids lived because they made up the majority of the soccer teams.

Chris and I crossed over to the old side of base and brought our inside jokes with us as a talisman. They were not especially clever, and they were certainly not kind. They were observational. They were earned. We joked about the officers’ kids we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by. We joked about how they wore Umbro soccer shorts and we called them “UmmmBros”. We told jokes about how they listened to U2 as we listened to glam rock cheese metal, and how they carried themselves like they were already officers themselves. We called them snobs, but the joke was less about them and more about us. It was about noticing patterns and naming them together.

We were enlisted kids. That mattered. Officers’ kids lived on a different side of the base, quite literally and indeed metaphorically. They had better lawns, better clothes, better toys, better posture, and what appeared to be better confidence. At least that was how it looked from where we stood.

The jokes worked because we both saw what we were joking about. We were not inventing the distinction. We were recognizing it. Every time one of us made a crack about the “UmmmBros” or U2’s latest album, it was not really about taste in music, sports, or clothes. It was a shorthand. A nod. A way of saying, I see what you see. I live where you live.

That is what inside jokes do. They compress shared experience into something small enough to carry in a sentence. They let two people signal belonging without having to explain themselves with no footnotes or justification. It is just recognition. We needed that on our side of the base.

Those jokes were not inclusive. That was the point. They carved out a small, protected space where we did not have to translate ourselves. In a life built on impermanence and rank, that mattered more than I understood at the time. We were not laughing to exclude others. We were laughing to anchor ourselves.

I think now about how much of my childhood was spent learning which version of myself would be safest in which room. Inside jokes short-circuited that work. With Chris, I did not have to perform. I did not have to prove anything. The joke itself was the proof. If it landed, I belonged.

Years later, I understand that belonging does not require permanence. It requires recognition. It requires someone else noticing the same absurdities and letting you laugh about them without explanation. That kind of belonging is fragile, but it is real. It lives in memory. It survives distance.

I do not remember every joke. I remember the feeling of them…the ease, and relief. The sense that, for a moment, I was not alone in my noticing.

And maybe that is the quiet truth. Belonging does not always announce itself. Sometimes it shows up as laughter that would not make sense to anyone else. Sometimes it sounds like a joke about “UmmmBros” and “U2, but not you”. Sometimes it is simply the moment you realize someone else is standing beside you, seeing the same thing, and choosing to laugh instead of explain.

Tag: identity