It was 1969 and I was 21 then and I felt sort of lost because 1st my best friend since Junior High School had had to join the Air Force instead of being drafted into the Army and dying in Viet nam then. So, he shipped off to Thailand to repair jet engines on jet fighters and Bombers who were fighting and bombing mostly in Viet Nam, Cambodia etc. then. We didn't know about the other countries until after the war was over.
My father had moved to San Diego and my best friend had gone to Thailand with the Viet Nam War effort so I felt sort of lost in all this. This was 1969 and it was the year that totally turned my life upside down.
I thought at 21 I was very grown up. After all, at 16 I had dated a girl 21 and I had owned my own car ever since one month after I turned 16 and was allowed to drive anywhere I wanted to as long as I paid for the gas ever since I was 16. So, though I felt very grown up and experienced I was still technically a virgin then because I was trained very Christian and to always be a perfect gentleman to women always. So, even though I had dated girls since I was 15 I had been what was known then as a "Good Boy".
But, 21 brought another side of me because I had broken up with 2 girls that I had sort of intended to marry one day and I was pretty torn up by this.
Life doesn't always go as planned you see. And I hadn't grown up as fast as I wanted to. At least not fast enough to pull off getting married at 18 or 21. In fact, what was actually happening to me was that I had to sort of go back in some ways to a younger version of myself and I didn't reach a point where I was stable enough to get married until I was 26 when my girlfriend got pregnant and we married then in 1974.
So, when you want things to be one thing often they are not yet and you cannot force things to be the way you want unless you want to destroy many of the lives around you of people you love.
Luckily, my father had trained me well to make good decisions even if those decisions tore me up and broke my heart and then I had to live with that.
So, I made good decisions for the people around me and I suffered terribly from "doing the right thing".
And so I entered I time where I wanted to kill myself from "Doing the right thing for everyone but me".
But, I don't regret now the decisions I made even though I almost didn't survive from 21 to 25 by making the right decisions for everyone else.
I guess life it like that if you take it seriously and protect others no matter what it does to you in the short and long run.
By my 30s I was very happy (at least until my father died when I was 37).
So, the ups and downs of life are something we all have to endure somehow and to have the integrity to make the hard decisions is what finally makes us all adults (if we can survive those right decisions at every point during our lives).
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