1, 2, Many: Veteran Suicide With Timothy Lawson

It wasn’t our weak hand. There was nothing weak about a Marine. My left hand was my support hand. It wasn’t as strong as my right hand, but it could still accomplish tasks. It seems like semantics, but it truly changed the way I thought about my left hand. I no longer avoided using it during certain tasks, but instead I became selective with how I used it. My right hand still reached for my firearm, my baton, and my pepper spray, but my left grabbed my handcuffs and assisted me in detaining a subject. My first job out of the Marine Corps was Loss Prevention at Macy’s. I was not thrilled with it, but I remember in my interview my employer asked me about my “opportunities.” I was confused. He followed up with a brief explanation. He considered the flaws, downfalls, and weaknesses of a person’s character to be “opportunities.” To him, these opportunities were areas of our lives that had the most opportunity to improve. At first, I thought it was cheesy, and I occasionally scoffed at the idea, but he made a good