I am not strong, but my mask is.

I haven’t written in a while.  I have been very busy, in both a good way and a bad way.  Running around with friends, weekends full of adventures, running and training for several upcoming road races (I am not fast, I am stubborn.)  New group therapy through the VA, which is proving helpful in some spots, but not so helpful for others.  Basically, I have been living my life.

The problem with living ones life though is that often times it is not what we want.

I love meeting new people, I love learning about them, talking to them, figuring them out.  I am a very extroverted introvert sometimes.  My “public” persona however is much different from how I feel a good chunk of the time.  I always try to smile, be upbeat, positive and welcoming.  Who knows how well I actually do while attempting this.  This is the persona that people get to know, and slowly if we stay in each others lives, I let them see the smaller, weaker me.

This can backfire however in the dating world I have noticed.  I present myself as confident, strong, self assured, and certain of where I am proceeding in my life.  For some people this is an instant attraction or a repellant.  I have been described by some as bad ass, amazing, awesome (not trying to brag, just repeating) and I then feel like I have to constantly live up to their descriptions.

On average these compliments, while oftentimes making me uncomfortable, are welcome because I see them for what they are.  Lately however I have been feeling anything but strong. I have been feeling like I am broken, and the glue I have been using to keep myself together for the past several months has stopped working.

Constantly presenting myself as my ideal, what I want the world to see, means that when I fail at maintaining this facade it devastates me, and makes me spiral down into a pit.  When I attempt to do things that people see as easy, normal, and expected of someone like me (socially that is) and I fail at it, I feel farther and farther away from my generation.

Friday I went to a Minnesota Twins game with some friends to celebrate a birthday.  Large crowds and noises cause me some anxiety, but in a controlled environment like a professional sporting event I can ease myself down, knowing that there are hundreds of people around to keep us safe and happy.  I had a couple of drinks, ate some overpriced ball field food, and enjoyed myself with these friends.

My anxiety was under control.  Friday night home games they have fireworks after the game, and since the Twins won I think it was more spectacular.  The fireworks, so close to mortars and explosions, started to ramp my anxiety back up.  We went to a packed bar, where I went to look for another friend.  We met up, hung out for a bit, and I left with him and his friends to hit the next bar.

Now I haven’t been bar hopping since college, I am that awesome.  For those interested, I am 31.  But I was enjoying myself, these new friends I had met were nice, we got along, and I felt safe.  So despite the early warning signs that I was putting myself in a position that I found stressful and dangerous for myself, I kept drinking and enjoying the company of nice people.

By the third bar I was drunk, not black out, not out of control, I could still make decisions.  This bar was packed, crushing up against each other packed, or that is how it felt.  One of the guys took me onto the dance floor, and about 5 minutes later I finally felt the clawing panic manifest itself.  I dropped my beer and ran outside.

Minneapolis does not have the most happening downtown night life, nothing like Chicago or New York, but we play a decent game.  I found a corner, sat down and the panic swallowed me up.  I was coherent enough to call a friend, one who I knew could calm me down and get me somewhere safe.  She did, she was amazing.  She, along with the help of a stranger who relayed my location to her, got me an Uber to take me home.  There was also another women that knelt down and talked to me, ultimately getting me to the car and making sure I was safe.  I cannot fully convey my gratefulness for the strangers, and of course for my friend Andrea.  There was no judgement in very voice while she talked me through the worst of my panic attack.  Only love and understanding.

Upon my return home I did what any drunk, almost incapacitated person would do, I took my dogs out to pee.

Next, I called my sister and left an unintelligible voicemail.

Then, what all good combat medics do, I started my own IV.  I knew I would be hurting in the morning, and I knew this was my best bet at mitigating it.

Now, I did somethings at this point that I am not proud of.  I called my mom, who luckily was awake, but I hung up on her when my sister called back.  I was so ashamed and embarassed by my behavior and reactions, that I ended up turning my phone off, and lying on the floor crying, precious saline dripping (actually flowing quite quickly) into my veins.  It was only after about 20 minutes that I realized that I had hung up on my mother, and she was probably worried.  I called her back, turns out she was moments away from calling the Minneapolis police so they could do a wellness check on me.  I have to admit, I could have used one if I hadn’t called my mom back.

I wasn’t suicidal, I have been lucky in that I have never felt the urge to take my own life.  I consider that a gift.  I do however often have the urge to inflict pain on myself, something to bring me back to reality.  I want to hurt physically when I cannot handle the emotional pain.  I had the strong desire to punch one of our brick walls, breaking my hand, just to feel something.  I didn’t.

I got off the phone with my mom, exchanged some texts with my sister who wisely advised me to drink some water, cuddle with our dogs, and watch some Supernatural.  This is what I did.

I woke up the next morning feeling not hungover, thank you saline!  I did however have a very nice black eye.  I don’t remember what happened to get that injury, and my best bet is that I caught an elbow running out of the bar.

Everyone experiences shame, and regret, and anger at their actions at some point in their life.  I am incredibly ashamed of how I reacted to the situation.  I am angry that I cannot go out and enjoy drinking with friends without the incredibly real fear of completely freaking out and getting hurt, or hurting others.  I do not feel regret over this though.

Prior to all of this happening the guy friend I specifically went to meet had been singing my praise, about how awesome I was, how I was a combat medic, how cool and hardcore.  This made my episode feel so much worse.  Clearly, I am not the person he sees me as.

It would be very easy for me to have a pity party, and let me tell you, I am having one.  Saturday was pathetic, Sunday and Monday were tolerable, today I lost it at work.

There was an event I was going to go to tonight, discussing an amazing book about women in combat.  There were some people coming though that I could not face with a black eye.  I was so embarrassed, and I just could not remove the thought from my head that they were going to spend the whole time judging who I was, and how I acted.  I left the office in tears, almost hysterical again, when I thought of how pathetic I would appear to these people.

Now, I have very little to no evidence that they would have been anything but concerned and supportive.  The brain is a powerful thing, it can make you believe anything in the face of actual evidence. So I skipped the event, spent an hour crying in a downtown park, and just continued my pathetic streak.

So what have I learned?

Nothing, yet.  Too close to the incident. Still to ashamed of what happened, no matter how bad ass people tell me my black eye is.

I am also incredibly disappointed in myself.  I feel as if I am not sure who the real me is.  The person I project to those around me?  Probably to a degree.  I know I am always confident in my medic skills, skills as a soldier, I am a compassionate and caring person.  I am smart, in shape, surrounded by people who love me.  I am to a degree that person everyone gets to meet right away.

I am also a broken shell of a person.  Someone that wakes up nightly covered in sweat, panting in fear.  I am so petrified of being hurt, physically and emotionally, that I cancel most of the dates I arrange, because it is easier than taking the chance. Loud noises kill me, screaming children will make me shut down for hours, if not a whole day.  I am medicated and have been in therapy on and off for almost 3 years.  The men I am interested in, the men I want to date and get to know, and hopefully one day fall in love, are also the men I don’t talk to or go on dates with because I am 99.95% certain that when they learn about the weaker part of me, will run, or worse pity me.

Now, I know that there are no such things as absolutes, so I know I do not have to be either my super strong mask, or my weaker shattered self.  I know that I am a combination of those two, and many more, aspects of my personality.  I know I am not alone in these feelings, and fears, and emotional pain.  That brings a great comfort to me, because just knowing you are not alone can help get rid of so much despair.

I want to find a partner (romantic, I have a really good number of close friends) who I can be my vulnerable, broken self it.  I am terrified that my mask is all they want to see, and when they see the deeper, more broken me, they run away.  If I am honest with myself I know that this is a burden.  PTSD, depression, anxiety, long term health effects of war, these are not things that should be handled lightly, and I would never want to ask someone to help me take them on.  I would never want to burden another human being with these issues.

And maybe that is the root, and basis of my mask.  It is a protective presentation, not just for me, but its my way of protecting those around me from having to deal with everything I have become saddled with.

To be honest, I am going to protect myself, and those who want to be with me, right into a lifetime of loneliness.  I just wish I had the courage, the skills, and the strength to stop this path.

No Clever Title

All of my other posts I have been able to think up a clever (in my opinion) title to draw the reader in, this one has no clever title.

I have been struggling with how to write this post for quite some time.  How diplomatic and political I should be, since some of the people I will be writing about have the very real potential to see it.  Should I speak to these people about my concerns and frustrations first?  Or publish a vague, but obvious enough, blog post and wait for them to figure it out?  After nearly 2 months of trying to figure out an answer, I found out that I don’t have one.

In the past couple of months I have experienced some incredibly horrendous examples of leadership on multiple fronts.  I believe I can speak on leadership with a level of expertise because I have been trained in it, and I have witnessed both tremendous, and terrible, examples of it over my almost 13 years with the military.  However, these are still just my opinions.  Everyone approaches leadership differently.  I like to consider myself mature enough to recognize that even though I may not agree with how someone is leading, does not mean they are bad at it.

The people I am going to write about, I can honestly say, are very bad at it.

Person one, military leader.

Poor, poor communications skills can destroy whatever other positive leadership attributes someone can have.  If you cannot communicate what your goals, ideas and guidance is, how the fuck am I supposed to accomplish my mission.  From not passing information onto soldiers, to flat out not making decisions about what needs to be done and then leaving it up to your subordinates (not delegating, deflecting) drains an organization.  My pet peeve is communication.  Especially in this day and age, where all it takes is a text message that can take you 10 seconds to write, there is no excuse for not keeping your soldiers in the loop every single hour of every single day if needed.  I believe you can be a good military leader without having deployed, however when it is pretty obvious you hung out in a unit that was non-deployable to avoid a deployment, then you makes snide comments about the issues your soldiers are dealing with after their deployments?  Yeah, suck a cock dude.

That is really a rant.  Sorry for that.  The heart of my issue with this leader is how he is destroying a program that took years to build up into a respected learning institution.  The program continues because of the dedication of the soldiers beneath him, it continues in spite of him.  We are doing a damn well job, imagine how much better we could be doing if we had amazing, or even average, leadership?

Person two, civilian managers

Ughhh…I separated the two because they usually have two very different skill sets.  I consider myself a competent NCO, I don’t know how well I would manage in the civilian world, mostly because my vocabulary would be limited.

Let me start by saying this, you can be an amazingly nice and caring person, and really be friendly and super nice to those you are given the opportunity to manage, and be a terrible manager at the same time.  I think some people (those without proper training) equate being nice and liked by your employees as being a good manager.  You are wrong.  Things I look for in a good manager is someone that can sit me down and articulate what I need to do to improve my performance at work, and guide me through those steps in a way that works best for both of us.  Someone that has earned respect through demonstration of knowledge and authority, not because you buy us donuts.  That is not respect peeps, that is because we like donuts.  You have to be able to learn about your employees and figure out which way is best to communicate to them.  Some people do better through emails, some face to face so there is no misunderstanding.  Some people are okay being corrected in a group, others need to be in private.  Failure to take the time to figure this stuff out, failure to even want to figure this stuff out, results in poor management issues.

When people are working in an emotionally toxic, or severely stressful, work environment it effects there health.  Since the new year I had been feeling terrible.  Migraines 5 days a week, nausea, no appetite, no desire to work out (even though I wanted to get back in shape) a constant pain in my upper shoulders, and I was drinking way more than I should have been.  I finally figured it out when a month ago I got so upset about going to work one Monday, I threw up in the shower and preceded to cry and huddle on the bottom of the tub (picture it!)  I left work, and started at a new place, and within 3 days most of these symptoms subsided.  I started sleeping through the night on most nights, the headaches are gone, appetite back and everything else.  I was feeling much better.  A terrible working environment did that to me.  My new place of employment had many of the same people, it was the exact same type of work and hours, the only real difference was the management.  See what I am getting at here?

Bad leadership makes people physically ill sometimes.  Sadly, the leaders are almost never effected.

Person three, Non profit leadership

This one hurts the most for me to write about, because it hurts a lot of people, and damages a lot of potential good in the world.  I wanted to be as involved in the veteran’s community when I got home as possible.  I wanted to keep that connection, and most importantly help other veterans who didn’t have the support system (I thought) I had when I got home.  I joined the VFW but have not been as active as I wanted to be, I just don’t feel like I can connect to a bunch of older white men.  I looked into Team Rubicon but had to focus on finishing law school and let it fall to the way side (for now.) I found a lot of good people, and good support, in Team RWB while I was studying for the Bar Exam.

A non profit organization I have been a part of for nearly two years, shall remain anonymous for this post, designed to reconnect veterans to their communities, has such incredible potential to help veterans, and civilians, reconnect and improve everyone’s lives.

Now, now our best volunteers are stepping back, because they are devalued, treated poorly and discounted.  For me the worst part is that a good chunk of the volunteers stepping back from the organization are veterans, those that it was founded to help.  This one person, this one incompetent leader, is slowly destroying what our chapter of the organization is capable of achieving, when it is needed most.  My personal experience with this individual was so upsetting, I almost completely left the organization.  I stopped going to events, I stopped engaging with those I knew from it, I dropped off the map when I needed these people the most.  When I was going through such a hard transition time, this person pushed me away.  It may not have been their intention, but it was the result.  Now I see it happening to so many of our other dedicated volunteers.  It angers me, but more than that it hurts to know that other veterans are suffering because of this.

Take away, grand poomba of guidance and wisdom…I don’t have any idea.  Fuck, I am 31, I know nothing.  I barely feel like an adult 95% of the time.

I guess my grand point, from my perspective is, if you are going to be in a leadership position, if you are going to have the blessed opportunity to get to manage and lead people, work hard at it.  Learn all you can about how to lead, how not to lead, what to do to take what you have and improve it.  I learned more about how to be a leader by watching people fail at it, then deciding that I would not make the same mistakes they did.  I learn more from bad leaders than good.  Sadly that is because I have spent more time around bad leaders than good leaders.

I will leave you with one last thought.  If you find people are abandoning your organization, team, unit, at a rate that suggests they are rats escaping a dying ship, don’t look at them and wonder what they have done to fail at working with you, look at yourself and wonder how you have failed them as their leader.  If you are the only one standing on your team, it is not because you are that amazing, it is because you have failed your team that hard.

My New Normal

It has been three years since I left for Afghanistan.  Much has happened in those three years.  I have deployed, safely come home, finished law school, taken and passed the bar exam, and even had a job.  I have been waiting to feel “normal” for the past two years.  Several weeks ago, I realized that I probably am never going to achieve “normal” again. 

I dislike the concept of “normal.”  You can tell this by my use of quotation marks around the word.  This is how one denotes their dislike of the accepted definition of word.  I feel the use of the word puts a large amount of societal pressure to conform, and I find that makes life very boring.  Death to Normalcy.  

More recently though I feel as if I have been failing at reintegration.  The idea of reintegration is that when we return from War, we are transitioned from the stress and reality of a combat situation to that simple, benign life of the civilian again.  For the National Guard there are entire programs, three phases, that help us and our families smoothly transition from War to Peace.  I have successfully completed this process twice.  Let me tell you, I am totally reintegrated back into society.  

There are numerous non-profits organizations that are also dedicated to helping Veterans transition from military to civilian life.  I am a member of several of them.  Most notably is Team RWB.  You can read all about this amazing organization in the link.  I have connected strongly with this one in particular because of its focus on physical activities and exercise to reconnect us to our communities.  It is trying to do good things.  

Back to me failing though.  I knew that the person that left three years ago would not be the same person that returned, whenever that time frame was.  I knew, it was a fact I had accepted.  I was hoping I would be a different person, it is why I wanted to go so badly.  I wanted the pressure, the challenge, and the change.  I wanted the chance to have been in both wars.  I knew what I was getting into.  So I didn’t expect to come home and slide back into my old life.  I didn’t expect to be able to reconnect with my friends and family and go back to the Shannon prior to Afghanistan.  

I did not anticipate the continuous struggle though. 

In the media, and in our lives, we have heard a lot about Veterans coming home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Moral Injuries, and a host of other mental health issues.  It surrounds us.  There are multiple narratives that I have heard, we are either broken irreparably, or we need treatment, support and understanding and we can be cured.  I am finding it more nuanced than that.  

I came home and reintegrated, I had some adjustment issues.  Heightened vigilance, anxiety in crowds, sleeping issues, difficulty reconnecting with close friends.  Everything I had experienced coming home from Iraq.  That I was prepared for.  I was even prepared for the depression, and eventual diagnosis of PTSD.  I was prepared for the reality of medication, and intense Prolonged Exposure Therapy, and the possible need for follow ups.  Once I went through it all, I was ready to get back to normal.  I was ready to resume my life and move on.

Now I want to highlight and emphasize that I am speaking for myself.  My experiences, and ideas, my voice.  I do not want people to think I am speaking for all Veterans, all Female Veterans, all Combat Medics.  This is me, my new normal. 

This is a fight that I am fairly certain may never end. 

I have accepted and gotten used to operating on about 5 hours of sleep a night, with the help of sleeping medication.  I have gotten used to and accepted the three or four nights a week I wake up completely drenched in sweat.  Not just sweaty, soaked through.  I am also glad I invested in a waterproof mattress protector.  I originally thought I was buying it because my dog likes to pee on my bed when he is mad at me, he hasn’t peed once, I have sweat through my sheets a couple of dozen times.  I understand that a loud room, or a group of people in a room that is too small for them (my workplace sadly) is going to cause me anxiety, heighten my vigilance, and make the rest of the day stressful and upsetting.  I know that there is a good chance I will cancel a first date at the last minute because the fear of meeting someone new overwhelms me.  I am aware of these things, so I can recognize them and fight to overcome what I can. 

Knowing these things, and being logically aware of them, does little to protect me from the practical realities of what this means.  My reality is that despite all of this knowledge, quality medication and mental health support at my local VA, there are days, or weeks, where I still feel like I am drowning, on dry land, surrounded by people yet still completely alone. 

It is my new normal. 

The friends I have made since I have returned, they are invaluable because they only know me as I am now.  They don’t know who I was before, so there are no expectations or misunderstandings.  I do not have to try and be who I was before, I can just be me, and they love me for it.  The friends I had before I left, they will read this and reach out and tell me that I don’t have to pretend or try to act like I did before I left.  They will mean it, they will genuinely mean it.  And I will love them for it.  The reality is that most of the time I feel as if I am interacting with strangers.  We all changed between when I left and when I came back.  It is the reality of the passage of time.  It still hurts. 

It hurts to realize that I will always be fighting to stay above water, it hurts to realize that no matter how hard I work I will still have days when I want to come home, lock myself in my room with a bottle of booze, and drink until I cannot remember anything.  Where I will be crying myself to sleep, in an empty apartment, feeling as lost and helpless as I did before I got help.  The difference is that I know not to drink those nights, or to limit myself to a small glass of wine.  I will wake up tomorrow and start my day like my night didn’t end in hysterics and tears. 

I won’t dwell and wallow in the pain, but every once in a while it does overwhelm me.  Tonight is one of those nights. 

This is my new normal, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. 

Mission in Afghanistan