hello all! this is the first time I’ll be using my new tag which is specifically for discussion of my experience with certain identities, both ones I’ve coined and one’s coined by others. this post I will be talking about tactikal!
to get you up to speed, the coining post is here. a lot of this is copy and pasted from the archivist discord server because I was yapping
I was more or less a military brat. I didn’t have a super stereotypical military brat childhood because we never had to move, and my dad was never posted far enough away that he was only gone for months at a time I’m really lucky in that regard. But he was in the military for 24 years! and he was a marine before that, so it was the entirety of my childhood, actually until the last few years — and he is essentially back in a military job now. systems engineer for subs if you are curious.
Anyone with a military parent will know they have a different way of looking at the world. I was surrounded by a lot of people in the military and I went to military events on occasion. I have a variety of positive, negative and neutral impacts from all this. I don’t know if this was just my personal experience but also having a military dad I was constantly told to NEVER join the military and the fact that I had a first hand experience of it means that I can hate the military complex with accuracy lol. I have no illusions about everything that it is.
I’ve found myself very easily drifting towards aspects that have just been a fact of my childhood assimilating into my identity. It has generally generated from being surrounded with those things for most my life. I mean like, I live in the uk, so unlike in maybe the states, it’s more of a unique thing to know someone who can handle firearms. So it felt specific to our family more than other families — and he was always very into airsofting as well LOL.
And it might seem silly to have such a connection to camo from my childhood but I swear to god like everything was camo in our house when I was growing up — we had actual camo too. Like ghillie suit style. We have a gas mask too, we just have Things that people don’t usually have in their household.
There’s also a mental element of it, or maybe you could say an attitude. My father is very very autistic man — the military was very appropriate for him specifically for this reason. He’s got a very regimented point of view, not strict, I think — but it’s a ‘can do’ attitude. He can command a space very well. I don’t ‘respect’ the military and I don’t like it and I don’t like it particularly knowing why my dad joined up (essentially to work through anger issues, by his own admission) and the kinds of environments it fostered but its system was responsible for the way I was raised and how I am as a person.
To summarise as best as possible, a lot of things, like being gun kin and gun objectum and camo objectum and tactikal and transmilitary and tactikal and all of this have come from me very neutrally process the impact the military has had on my life since I was young. I’ve decided to omit a lot of the negative here as I didn’t want this post to go in that particular way, but any of you who share my experience or are particularly good at reading between the lines might infer that my relationship with my father is. complicated — and a lot of that stems from his time serving too.
Anyway, if anyone made it to the end, I hope this was an interesting read. If you have any questions please direct them to my comments or my inbox.
@radiomogai @mogaiwarchive no pressure to reblog but if you wanted moar experience stuff!
