Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome
How PTSD almost ended me
My life has had a myriad of traumatic events. Coping for me, as well as many others, has been a challenging feat to achieve. Perhaps it’s because I used to view it as something I could ‘achieve.’ Something I could accomplish and be done with it. And why wouldn’t I? Nobody wants to consider the possibility that it cannot be mastered and put to rest!
Less than a year after my tour in Afghanistan and a handful of terrible life events, I was struggling. ‘Improvise, adapt, and overcome’ is a phrase predominantly used in the military. It is ingrained into me, and I take this everywhere. Life after the military was so different; all structures were left behind, and now there was no ‘mission.’
Nightmares were (are) the worst of it. I’d been white-knuckling it for so long that even the dreams were becoming more obscure and becoming less and less related to the actual traumatic events and more about hypothetical events that never happened. It was so nebulous that I even had a dream that my (toddler) daughter had drowned in the lake behind my house.
I had no child (at the time), no house to speak of, and I didn’t live particularly close to a body of water. Nor did any of my traumatic events ever happen in or around water. How the hell do you even combat nightmares that don’t even…
