Once a Marine – Vol. 1, Chapter 2
Maintaining my identity as a Marine after my transition to a civilian.
The hardest part about my period of service by a very large margin has been retaining aspects of my identity as a Marine, without losing the person I was before. At this point, I’ve been a veteran
The PDF can be found here:
It’s a really good read that I was recommended by a SSGT when I was still a member of Air Control Training Squadron. Copies of this book were littered across my unit. There are actually two different versions I’ve found, the second one I’ll post here:
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/usmc/mcrp/6-11d/mcrp6-11d.pdf
In the first chapter of this story I reviewed the total length of my military career:
1 years 4 months 14 days
or 16 months 14 days
or 71 weeks 4 days
or 501 days of active duty
It’s worth nothing that one of the most important things I’ve ever done was start the process of recovery while I was still active duty. Here is a current progress report on my recovery:
11 months 28 days
or 51 weeks 5 days
or 362 days
In a few days I’ll have a year of sobriety, and in a few months I will have as much time clean/sober as I have had time in the military. This year of sobriety has been much slower than most years, and I’ve surprisingly spent less time working, and more time reflecting on my life and my career as a whole.
I moved to Florida, met my grandmother for the first time, got engaged, and even converted to Islam. My conversion complicated my insurance career slightly, while my engagement taught me the importance of multiple jobs (if I expect to afford a woman). After praying, meditating, and reviewing my career as whole, I decided to do insurance in the day, and security at night.
I had already been working on my guard certification before I moved to Florida. It’s worth noting that I moved to Florida on January 21, 2026, about three weeks after I finished my initial guard training. It’s also worth noting that I moved to Florida mostly for the sake of housing and spending time with my family, despite the fact that it caused me to “reset” my career progress, since both the security industry and insurance industry require different licenses in each state you work in.
I got my insurance license transferred to Florida just two months after moving, but I had started working at a marketing firm to pass the time while waiting for my license to transfer. It was there that I met the girl I would get engaged to, my relationship took over my life for a while. I don’t not regret it whatsoever.
It’s worth noting that most of my career has been in marketing. I go into a deep dive on the “about” section of this blog, but I’ll do a quick summary here.
Outside of the military, I’ve worked in marketing for 4 years, spent 2 years in sales/customer service, and another 2 years in accounting/finance, with the 2 years in accounting in finance and 6 months of marketing coming after my military service.
Out of the $261,411 I’ve earned over the course of my working career, $118,035 has been from marketing. Most of my marketing career comes from before I joined the Marines, which is why I’ve struggled to answer the following question:
“what do you do for work?”
Sometimes I want to answer with what I want to do for work. But after reviewing my career, I think it might be most appropriate to answer with what I’ve actually done for work. The answer is marketing by a very wide margin, unless we are talking about post-military, which the answer is accounting/finance, or more specifically; insurance.
The point I’m trying to make is simple: I should leverage my experience in marketing to become a military influencer, while also recruiting for my insurance company. I should start planning my expenses (and events) for the upcoming year.
I’m going to try my best to attend this event. It’s actually pretty relevant considering my situation. As far as uniforms, I’ll work on those too, but it’s more important that I first get a rifle, a car, and a spouse. Not being able to use the military for finances means I’ll have to earn my money through security work and insurance. Outside of that, I can sell art prints and books, but we’ll see.
Generally I want to limit the amount of creative work I have to do without having a base from a salary or residuals. The one thing I really do want to look into is tabletop Medicare sales, D2D Medicare sales, and better ways to recruit.
Between this week and next week, I’ll promote the above event, work on my guard training, and do some recruiting for my insurance agency. I have to learn how to play the long game, like I should be playing with all my relationships. That being said, since my longest employment is only 18 months, my goal really is just longer relationships.
The core idea of sustaining the transformation is to not start anything that I can’t finish, or otherwise do for the full intended duration.
That means a length of employment (or a stream of income) lasting more than 4 years.
4 years of continuous sobriety.
4 years of gun ownership.
4 years of vehicle ownership.
A marriage lasting 8 years (or more).
Additionally, making sure I leverage the [timely] work of others and avoid living in a vacuum. This means being more on top of current events (within the Marine Corps), especially those involving Haiti, as well as current events involving politics in general.
🩸 
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