Current Issues: Getting Worse · 2:42pm May 7th
Hello, all of you.
For those who have been following me for any length of time, you've come to know that I have my fair share of issues. The biggest issue has been my health, and I've been relatively open about most of those problems. The second largest issue I've rarely discussed has been my occupation and dealing with the compensation due to my ongoing condition.
Well, with time growing shorter and less of a reason to hold onto as much as I have, I thought I should open up a little more, as it will be the reason I'll likely be less active for a while.
I've been an active duty service member somewhere in the range of 13 years. I won't say the branch, what I've done, where all I've gone, or what I've experienced. My career has been wildly unconventional, as I have gone and done what few coming in where I started were allowed to do, see, support, and, in some cases, survive without many back home ever even knowing the threat existed. In other cases, for some deployments, not all of us make it home. In one particular case, the loss of one of my superiors still haunts me. In other cases, suicides always hung heavily over my first command in particular. The first one I remember harshly as someone I helped to get checked in on his first day and made a joke that he did get and then took offense to. After that, he joined up with another company and was assigned to a detachment that I never got to work or associate with. Months later, after an argument with his girlfriend and untold other issues he refused to share with anyone, he failed to muster. He chose to find a quiet place away from everyone else to separate himself from the world permanently and wondered if I had accidentally set the tone for how he viewed the command.
PTSD is a mother fucker. It affects different people in different ways. Some people are stuck in the fight throughout their days, though that scenario is overplayed in older media and still poorly portrayed. More often, and now better treated, people will drop to the ground or snap after a loud bang or after being spooked, but not often with a violent response. Night terrors, however, I think are the least commonly talked about, if not the least understood. Not every nightmare is reliving the trauma of the same event. The mind will create new scenarios, new victims, abusers, locations, carnage, inescapable traps, and the results miserable.
Half-waking up from a night terror and flipping furniture or fighting someone in the room is not unheard of, nor is having the person waking from that nightmare mistake others around for someone else and continue to act out the dream. Other times, it's a vicious cycle where you're so exhausted that you fall asleep and are thrust back into a nightmare so terrifying that you wake up over and over again, never getting a full night's rest. Maybe the process carries on for so long that you become too tired to wake and what your nightmares torture with is too much to take, but since you're unable to break from sleep because of your exhaustion, you piss yourself out of fear.
Some of that was just venting, I think. I do see a therapist at least twice a month, so being able to talk about some of this shit is good... ish. However, don't read too much into everything I write. Not everything I wrote is explicitly about me. As much as I want to open up, and I have, this isn't exactly the type of forum to expose too much of myself and not speak in general terms or others who have suffered along side me on this journey.
Otherwise, to get down to what started this blog originally, I'm having a few too many problems just operating as I should and my writing is suffering because of that. I did another read-back of my last chapter and was floored with the amount of errors still present in the text. I would like to devote more time to focusing on putting out quality literature, but due to my health, and the mental issues I listed above that leads to the next big issues I'm now faced with having to tackle...
Given all of my health problems, while serving, I have been going through the process of being medically retired. I've been cleared for disability, but after the first review, I was not cleared for medical retirement, only medical separation. Now, medical separation is not a bad thing by itself, it does not provide some of the greater benefits I was expecting. This also comes after finding out that given the short staffing problems the DoD and the officials in DC that make the reviews are having, on top of more discoveries made during my review process, my findings for their review were incomplete.
So, I will have to work with the lawyers provided to make amendments to my case to hope for a better outcome. This is, sadly, on top of dealing with trying to work on other legal issues with my ex over a house that was destroyed in a flood. Currently trying to get our way out of it, but I can't do much as messed up as I am.
This blog isn't a cry for help. I'm not asking for pity or a gofundme. Crossing The Trixie Bridge was an outlet for me to explore and help destress with a lot of the issues I had been dealing with, mostly by myself. A fantasy over pushing past those mental struggles and turmoil to rise up and be the better versions of themselves they wanted to be. Perhaps one day I'll do a deeper exploration of how The Stranded Seven actually reflects me and others I knew to make up their in-story past and personas. A New Life in the Crystal Empire was meant to be the part of CTTB that I never go to... Not simply rising past their problems but actually dealing with them, addressing those fears, insecurities, and traumas so that after the moment to rise past them was over, they wouldn't have to worry about looking back to see those demons still lurking in the shadows.
After all, that's where I've been. That's what I've been doing. So long, Day after day, command after command, with new missions, operations, tasking, battle plans, rising to the occasion despite the demons haunting and taunting me. Now, though? I'm barely part of a command. I have not missions. I take part in no operations. My tasks consist of mustering over the phone so they know I'm still alive and completing DoD mandatory online training. I'm not given any plans nor asked to provide any. I used to be able to recon and patrol missions, fire a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, run with a crew-serve weapon on my back, set up secure long-haul communications that circumnavigate the length of the globe to pass my site while still making good radio contact, out-shot my commanding officer on the range (oddly enough I got scolded for that one), and traversed the high seas on one of the US Navy's most powerful carriers when I wasn't even assigned to the damn thing,.. I have done so many things I can't even mention, all of them demanding whoever take on the challenge to rise to the occasion because of the risks involved.
...but virtually nothing is expected of me any longer. I have no occasion to rise to. There are no real expectations to meet outside of the bare minimum.
You might see me mess around with a few things here and there, probably more active on Discord, but I don't have much focus anywhere.
Reminds me if two or three stories here on Fimfiction.
But unlike the fiction characters you where the real deal. Wow
Everyone eventually runs out of demand, there are a lot of movies serious and comedy like 'Major Pain'.
Maybe it's currently simply not needed?
Nothing in comparison on my end, dorry can't help you there
I feel very sorry for you, dude.
Maybe try to change your daily experience anyhow to get the day spiced up...
Different tasting toothpaste for example, mustard...
How about strawberry or cherry flavor.
Don't go for Ingwer, shit is numbing my taste buds worse than Mint flavored
5779738
There was a reason why I put so much emphasis on why the ponies were impressed on how well the humans were able to put together their mission planning. That shit ain't easy. A lot of the details about what was experienced and callbacks to precautions to take come from lessened learned.
5779739
Not many do. It's better more people are spared having to live through any of this.
5779749
Mustard flavored toothpaste is just a tag I put in as a running gag. It serves no purpose other than to amuse me and confuse anyone who reads it.
5779742
It's appreciated, but I'm taking it all one day at a time. One way or another, it will work itself out. For better or worse, I'll eventually be out and have to figure out what to do with myself. I've always been a survivor, in more ways than one.
I’m so sorry.
5782271
I've been living with this for a little over two years now, if my failing memory is correct. It's just one of those things you have to learn to accept and move on with, or it will consume you.