Hey, Jessie!

“Oh, so you’re like Jessie from that Disney show?”

Military life is something that, when you’re a military child, can seem like it encompasses all of your world. It’s always there, and it affects everything from where you live, where you go to school, how often you move, your house, and far more. Military life's impact ranges from quite important details (such as those listed) all the way to tiny things like terms/acronyms you might use. And especially when you find yourself living on a military base, the only people around you can be very deeply rooted in this lifestyle too. 

I’ve never been a stranger to military life. My dad joined the Army far before I was born, so for 13 years, my world revolved around his job. I lived on bases as well, in close-knit communities where everyone I knew lived the exact same way. However, all it took was one piece of news for all of this familiarity to disappear. 

My dad decided to retire from the military when I was 13. And in what seemed like a singular moment, I was thrust from my action-packed life overseas into a small Ohio town, where it seemed like nothing ever happened. Although I had been through many, many moves before, this one made me feel more lost than anything else. We weren’t living on a small, gated military base any longer, but instead in a place that seemed to expand further than I could see and without anybody there to show us around. 

I’m an extroverted person, which I feel military kids have to be through constantly moving and making friends as soon as they can. So naturally, paired with being an attention-seeking middle schooler, I was telling everyone I met about the thing that was now so unique about me - I was a military kid who had grown up in Europe and Asia. 

However, I forgot I wasn’t at a DODEA school anymore. Instead, I was in small-town Ohio where most kids had lived in the same place since they were born, and they had known each other sometimes since kindergarten. There was a lot of mutual understanding that needed to be done, considering things that were obvious to me were unheard of for them, and very much vice versa. 

Now enters the comment/connection that I’ve heard a good handful of times. “Oh, so you’re like Jessie from that Disney show!” 

For those that are unfamiliar, Jessie is a kids show that follows a girl who moves from a military base in Texas to New York City, where she becomes an aspiring actor and much more. Yet, Disney, in all their exaggeration, didn’t exactly do the best job of accurately portraying the life of a military kid. And while I’m sure depending on where and who you are your experiences are quite numerous, I know for a fact that nobody’s ever driven a tank to school.

Within the show, there’s a lot of exaggeration, like being forced to live in training barracks, digging trenches, and army crawling under barbed wire... which speaking for myself are not what I associate with the life of a military kid. While Jessie always seemed satirical and unrealistic to me, it was the only representation of this lifestyle for a lot of my classmates, and it wasn’t far off what my teachers associated my life with. 

It was frustrating to break through the barrier to my friends that my childhood, while definitely holding some differences from their's, wasn't nearly as different as they thought. At the end of the day, I had to break through the myths and show them that I was a kid too. Even now, a few years after all of this, I’m constantly meeting new people who when they meet me and hear about my childhood, think I went to a military boarding school and had access to tanks.

While I no longer get frustrated or mind when people have these assumptions or ask questions, it still frustrates me that there’s not yet an accurate source of representation for what my life was like. What was so intimate and personal to myself became an idea that I struggled to convey to others, leaving me feeling lost and not understood.

There are over 1.6 million children of active duty service members right now. This number climbs to over 2 million when you consider those connected to the national guard, the reserves, or retirees. It’s not a small percentage of people by any means. Reading these statistics opened my mind to a realization - if there are so many of us out there, why isn't there some piece of media or common idea out there that represents or details this life? If it's possible for this to happen with so many of us, who am I missing out on learning about right now? And finally, what's stopping us from changing this?

This is why it’s so important to get your message and story out there. Talk to new people and learn. Write a blog or song, create a podcast, make a TikTok video! Not learning about others is what causes us to be closed-minded, and it can stop us from growing mentally. Learn about other ways of life and try to open your range of understanding, just as people might try to step into your shoes for a day. Make your voice known, and always advocate for yourself. And if you ever think you aren’t being well-represented, become the one to make a difference.