Yessir.

Hungry for hierarchy.

I struggled to fall asleep as a kid. Every night, I’d guilt trip or bargain with my dad so that he’d lie next to me and tell me a story as I drifted off. There were three categories we visited evening after evening: Bible stories, stories from his own childhood, and stories from when he was in the army. My dad grew up in South Africa during a period of conscription, he had two years worth of mostly unpleasant (but sometimes quite funny) stories to tell me. Some blend of the strict hierarchy that the young privates were squeezed into, the crass tones the soldiers of all ranks took with one another, and the generally brutish behaviour so heavily displayed in the army disagreed with Dad. As a result, my impression of his conscription was something of a sentence—a duty he had no choice but to carry out, eagerly awaiting its end.

The military experience of the other men in my family is coloured a different shade. When I hear my uncles’s and my grandfather’s stories, in fact, my father’s seems to be something of an outlier. My grandpa, Mom’s dad, went to school a year early and in turn graduated high school a year younger than his peers. In his time serving his country, he was made a member of the military police; his job was to drive kilometres upon kilometres along beautiful coastlines and through semi-arid deserts on his motorcycle, escorting caravans of high ranking military officers as they made their way to and from appointments. At sixteen, his government gave him a jacket, a bike and a badge and paid him to ride into the sunset. Not too shabby. My uncle, Mom’s little brother, has about a dozen stories of all the mischief he got up to while he was in the army (though I’m sure he has many more, I imagine not all of them were suitable for my boyhood ears). His getting up to mischief was hardly new, but his stories from the army seemed larger than life. One of his tales involves his donning a doctor’s coat and teaching a handful of medical students correct suture methodology, despite lacking any formal training and without exactly being asked to lead their instruction. Another uncle, my dad’s brother-in-law, was stationed in the navy, and spent his two years patrolling the gorgeous, sunny, western coast of Africa on a boat with his fellow recruits, all of whom were barely twenty years old. For a short time, I was the only man in my family who hadn’t been enlisted in the military. Until my cousins began growing beards. Now, the three of us, despite our close interfamilial relationships with our uncles and fathers, are experiencing a distinctly different coming of age than they did.

I’ve been applying to jobs for about a month now, and I’m having a really tough time of it. I’m in the weeds. I am receiving rejection letter after rejection letter. I invest an hour or two into each application after I find an opportunity that looks promising. I research the company and the role, writing a custom cover letter and sending it along with my CV, which itself took a week and a half to meticulously craft such that it utilises all the appropriate keywords and measurable outcomes evident in previous positions. In order to present myself as a valuable asset, I must prove every aspect of my personality, measure and detail all of my previous successes and outstanding achievements; which employers seem to think are readily available at the nearest supermarket. Unless I am the perfect applicant in every respect, I cannot earn so much as a unique email response. Globalisation has served me well in countless aspects of my life, but here I feel as though I must compete with the whole world just to win the possibility of getting a job. I’m not looking to be a rockstar or an astronaut, mind you. It seems that in order to make a living wage I must, somehow, figure out how to catch the attention of a prospective employer to stand out from the sea of applicants who are also all trying to attract attention to themselves. It remains a mystery to me, how one actually achieves this feat.

As a kid listening to my dad’s experiences in the army, I was always grateful that I wouldn’t have to go. Growing up, I was overweight, over-sensitive and thoroughly bullied by who seemed to me at the time to be the childhood versions of the brutish men from my father’s stories. I felt that I had escaped restrictive hierarchical systems built to discipline much tougher boys than I, and that I would be squished to mush by the affront that was my image of military training. I am still a sensitive and emotional man, but I wonder now if my life would have been easier or simpler, had I been conscripted. My idea of the army is, of course, probably wrong. But I’ve been knocking on doors for weeks, waiting for the right one to open. My knuckles are bruised and my shoulders are slouched. I am beginning to wonder if I’m doing something wrong, is there is secret knock? Is anyone even home? Did I miss something? When I was in the kitchen this week, making myself a cup to tea to fuel another fruitless round of applications, I wondered about the army. I longed for the apparent clarity with which the military operates. Chain of command; speak when spoken to; do what you’re told, no more and no less. For a moment, I considered the bright promise of an opened door, even if I couldn’t choose which one.

Soon the right job will come. I’ll make hot chocolate instead of tea, then.

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None of the men in my family ever saw action, thank the Lord. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.