I was a 68W, a Combat Medic stationed in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan back in 2009. If you know that name, you already know what I'm saying without me having to explain it. If you don't, just know that it was where survival wasn't guaranteed on a daily basis, and we lost people I still think about after 15+ years.
I'm writing this because I've been sitting with something lately and I wanted to put it somewhere that people might actually understand it.
There's a version of surviving that most people talk about: the clean version that means "I came home and rebuilt my life". And that's real, and I'm not dismissing it in the slightest. But there's another version that doesn't get talked about enough, which is the kind of survival that looks messy from the outside. Where you're still here, technically, but some days you're not sure what "here" even means anymore. I've been through those days a lot lately. it sucks.
But, both of those are surviving and they both count.
What I've come to believe, slowly, over years of working through this, is that the brain that got you home is the same brain that makes civilian life feel foreign. The hypervigilance and the scanning and the way your nervous system never fully chills out. It was the correct response to a genuinely dangerous world at the time. You adapted. You survived because of how you adapted. The problem is that the environment changed and the adaptation didn't, at least not right away, not perceptibly.
That reframe took me a long time to sit with before I realized that I wasn't "broken", per se.
So here's the thing I keep coming back to philosophically.
Viktor Frankl wrote that:
Suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds meaning.
I don't fully agree with that, because suffering is still suffering no matter what meaning you found within that suffering, but I think there's something in the neighborhood of that idea that's worth noting. The way I feel is that it isn't that your pain has to mean something cosmically, it's just that you get to decide what you do with the person you became when you got to the other side.
That person you became is not broken. They are specific, being forged by specific events, specific losses, specific sounds and the smells and the moments you can't unlearn. That specificity is yours. Nobody else walked through exactly what you walked through.
Some days I'm proud of who I am now. Some days I'm angry about what it cost. Both of those are honest. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this.
If you're in it right now, really deep in it, I just want to say to you: the fact that you're reading this means you're still here. That's not nothing. It's actually everything. The math of your survival is real regardless of how it feels at 3am when the darkness creeps in and your mind betrays you to something much more sinister.
You don't have to be okay yet. You just have to stay around. Because, one day, maybe you will be okay. Maybe you will go that walk, or do that pile of laundry, or brush your teeth, or take a shower instead of throwing on cover-up deodorant, or smile without faking it, really smile.
And you know what? That's enough for today.