"Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers."

For the first eighteen years of my life, all I could think about was growing up to become someone incredible and important and successful, who would make my family proud of me. Hearing my mother talk about her father being an Air Force veteran, her brother being retired Air Force, her birth on Edwards AFB, being in ROTC with her brother... and then getting to wear my grandfather's flight helmet to dress as Amelia Earhart... all I wanted to do with my life was to be a fighter pilot in the Air Force. Today, I got to stand underneath the behemoth black jet I dreamed of flying right up until I saw the screen that thanked me for my interest and told me I wasn't qualified.

Parts of me still feel crushed. After all, I do share personality types with Amelia Earhart. Parts of me still feel like a failure, particularly since it doesn't seem to matter what I do, I appear to be stuck in a dead-end job. But the rational part of me is legitimately glad that future wasn't meant for me.

I saw a video recently, in which an American soldier gave voice to thoughts that had always existed in the back of my mind as I was watching MASH with my family: soldiers are told that the people on the other side of that battlefield are the enemy. In reality, those soldiers are most likely being told the same thing. The reality of life is that these battles are forged in offices in the minds of men who are power-hungry, twisting the desires of their people and manipulating reality in order to maintain power, control, and authority. As much as I wanted to fly, I always wondered why conflicts between leaders weren't settled in 1-on-1 combat like the challenge battle in Black Panther.

Seeing Team America: World Police put a lot of my feelings into perspective. Idiocracy even moreso. And then I saw V for Vendetta. When I read Fahrenheit 451 and 1984, I legitimately couldn't see a version of America that looked like that.

Now I'm living in it, with a little Harrison Bergeron and Equilibrium thrown in for flavor, even though many of us dreamed of a world more like Star Trek.

Even if I had done everything exactly the way everyone had always told me I should've, even if I'd stuck to reading the Bible, sewing, wearing makeup and dresses and keeping my husband happy, I still wouldn't have been born to understand war or politics the way they've been managed in America. I'd have still been a challenge to what many see as a 'true' American.

It's funny, then, how many times I've heard: "If you don't like it here, go somewhere else." As if America even made that an easy possibility.

I know part of feeling like I don't really belong anywhere is related to being autistic. Part of it is growing up Catholic and automatically understanding that the real world is very different from the way I'd been raised to see it. I still can't help but feel like it's a good thing I wasn't cut out for the American military, because I feel a lot more like a Canadian born on my parents' foreign vacation.