Pitfall Mental Health
Don’t Abandon Your Post — You’re Needed
I’ve known far too many friends who have taken their own lives. My own mental health difficulties are still raw and hard to write about, but I hope that this message reaches someone who needs to hear it — don’t abandon your post!
Look at the smile in that photo. That’s someone who’s happy, right? And why wouldn’t I be? It was springtime in Jordan, and I was touring the ancient Roman ruins of Jerash. This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and those always call for big toothy grins.
History nerd alert!
I was always kind of like that though, even when I was back in the office. I guess I just have a horrible habit of being upbeat.
I’ve been called ‘unflappable’ more times than I care to admit.
In the preceding weeks when this photo was taken, I’d been told by my co-workers, on no less than three occasions, ‘You seem so happy,’ or otherwise ‘How do you stay so positive all the time.’
I should’ve been an actor. Unfortunately, one of the things I appear to be very good at is pretending to be someone I’m not.
The truth was that I was decidedly unhappy. I felt very alone, and generally shitty all the time. At the time of that photo, I had felt like this for months.
I couldn’t sleep.
I hadn’t eaten a full meal in days.
I would cry several times a day.
And I had frequent thoughts of taking my own life. The following days would be even worse.
Leaving Home
In the fall of 2022, I had just passed the ten-thousand-word mark on my SciFi novel I had been writing for the past few months.
The year is 2076 and AI has taken over the government. There’s flying surfboards, futuristic battle scenes, weapons that control emotions, and cyberkinetic orgasms. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.
I had a real-life big adventure ahead of me too.
I would be going to the Middle East with my National Guard unit for the next year or so. But I knew I would have some spare time and one of my goals was to finish my novel while I was overseas.
It’s very difficult to say goodbye to your loved ones for such a long period of time. Before leaving, I crafted a wooden advent calendar with slots for each week I would be away from home. I filled them with small gifts for my two children, and wrote notes to them that they could read at the end of their week. The kids enjoyed decorating the ‘Daddy Cubbies’ with drawings they had made and looked forward to taking turns opening them each week.
It took some time, but I got settled into my new post with my unit overseas. The concept of ‘manning your post’ in the military is a sacred one. You NEVER leave your post until properly relieved. That’s the binding contract you sign up for when joining.
Your understanding of this concept will be important later on in my story.
I did a fair bit of traveling around the area, but never feared for my physical safety or those around me.
I say that because I’m concerned you’ll misinterpret the second sentence after reading the first. For all intents and purposes, I had a comfortable office job.
It might be hard for those who have never been stationed on a US military base to imagine, but my days were pretty mundane to be honest.
Here was my normal day. It’s probably not much different than yours:
Up at 6. Maybe go for a run. Hit breakfast. Ride my bike (yes bike) to my office. Go to meetings. Lunch. Make some phone calls. Go to dinner. Read for a bit or watch a movie. Then lights out at 10. Rinse and Repeat.
I was never mistreated by anyone either. People think that you’re always getting yelled at in the military.
On the whole, that’s not usually the case. And over there, if anybody would be doing the yelling, it would probably have been me actually. After all, I was a Major. I’m not much of a yeller though.
In civilian-ese a Major would be called a ‘middle-management job.’
I don’t want to get into the exact nature of my job. But over the next few months, I began to feel it wear hard on me. I started to feel quite lonely.
It wasn’t a hard job. I worked with incredible professionals. It wasn’t dangerous, and I had ‘three hots and a cot.’
That’s Army-speak for ‘I had it pretty darn easy.’
Still, the feelings of isolation were hard to shrug off at times.
Then my grandfather passed away.
The Crisis
I flew back to the States on leave to attend the funeral and got to spend a week at home with my family.
Then I had to say another goodbye to my kids. They were only about halfway through the Daddy Cubbies.
We still had a long time to go till we would be truly reunited.
It was a really tough goodbye.
When I got back to the base, I tried to settle in again.
We had some tough things going on at work, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing a horrible job. I began to second guess everything. I soon experienced sudden visceral feelings of uselessness and worthlessness.
Those seeds quickly sprouted into a full-blown existential crisis.
I stopped eating.
I lost so much weight.
Panic attacks would wake me throughout the night.
Sleeping pills didn’t help.
I started crying.
First a little bit. Then a few times a day…
Rinse and repeat. For days. Then weeks. Then a few months.
The thought of ending it all crept silently into my psyche like the song of a Siren’s sweet escape. A gentle release from these intense feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing.
In hindsight, I’m grateful for these physical manifestations of depression. They validated my predicament into a true medical emergency. I knew I had to do the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life and something I should have done much sooner…
Asking For Help
As men, particularly male Soldiers, we’re pretty bad at talking about: our feelings, others’ feelings, how feelings affect our lives, why we have feelings, what these feelings are good for, and how we can navigate those feelings in a constructive way.
I’m pretty sure I misspell the word ‘feelings’ more often than not.
And God forbid we let someone else know we’re having ‘feelings.’ Most of us would rather be tarred and feathered than ask for help. No joke.
I was actually afraid of asking for help.
Afraid I would be a burden on others for doing so.
Afraid people would think I was inept.
Afraid I would be abandoning my post.
Afraid I would worry my family back at home if I told them what was going on on the inside.
But I knew if I didn’t do something soon, I wouldn’t make it home. It was time to confront this issue head-on.
I hadn’t been in the hospital for more than half an hour when the nurse told me that there was a ‘Two-Star General’ who wanted to visit with me.
My boss. And a very good man.
I stood up from the bed when he walked over and embraced me for longer than I can really remember.
I do remember crying at that moment. And feeling as though I had somehow failed him, my unit, and myself.
He pulled up a chair at the bedside and we talked for a while. His words of comfort and encouragement were those more of a friend, a fellow human being, than of a boss or a high-ranking officer. He told me, multiple times, that “You did the right thing.”
He would visit me a few more times before my unit sent me back state-side. On his last visit, he gave me his challenge coin.
The thought of going home was all at once a blessing and a curse. I would soon get to see my family again. But I had committed the cardinal sin — asking for help. I was now a burden on all those who would help me. Right?
For Loved Ones
We always wonder why those who commit suicide just didn’t reach out and ask for help.
I believe these imagined thoughts of becoming a burden on others, or feelings of being weak, or perhaps not being ‘man enough’ contributes greatly to them not doing so. It’s tough for anyone to confess feelings of worthlessness to anyone else. But I think this false realization hits men in a visceral way.
The people going through the crisis quite literally can’t think straight. Their brain’s amygdala is firing on all cylinders where the only decisions they can make are fight or flight. They can't see their way out of the debilitating darkness.
It’s hard to make any decision at the bottom of a well.
Before I sought help my co-workers remarked on several occasions how happy I seemed all the time. That’s another lesson to those friends or loved ones of people going through a mental health crisis.
It’s also very hard to surmise how others are actually feeling on the inside.
I think the best thing we can do for them is let them (your friends and loved ones — all of them) know that you’re here for them even when you don’t think they need to hear it. Because maybe they do.
Hopefully their bodies will tell you what their words won’t. They may become emotional, show signs of lack of sleep, or drastic appetite or weight changes. Maybe they just went through a significant event such as: a death in the family, or maybe they have to leave home frequently for work. Lack of an adequate support system can make a bad situation so much worse.
For Those Hurting
For those of you going through a crisis: you are loved and you are worthy of love. And unfortunately, you’re probably hiding your pain as well as I was. Help is a phone call or door knock away. Especially if you are in the military. I’m a walking testimony to how your comrades will rally around you to get the help that you need. Because they care for you, and they love you. They may be rough around the edges, but most of them also have hearts of gold. And they would tell you to advocate for yourself and your well-being.
It’s ok to ask for help.
It’s healthy to ask for help.
You’re not weak when asking for help.
You are not a burden by asking for help.
You are doing the right thing in asking for help.
You are not abandoning your post by asking for help.
Asking for help and saying, ‘I can’t take it anymore and something needs to change,’ are exactly the words you need to use to change your circumstance. You need to tell someone those powerful words. Preferably someone who has the power to help you, but asking counsel from a friend is ok too.
They will give you a new perspective and could change your circumstances completely. If you’re in a crisis, you literally cannot think your way out of it. You may be too far gone for that. When you’re in a mental health crisis, your brain is literally in survival mode. What’s happening to you is as much physiological as it is emotional.
You NEED others to help guide you to a smooth landing.
I asked for help. It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life, and I initially felt like crap for doing it. And you might too. But it sends a chill down my spine to think of the alternative if I hadn’t.
As I was out-processing stateside before finally returning home from deployment, I received a lot of focused cognitive therapy from professionals who really cared. I remember very clearly a civilian doctor looking at me point blank and telling me unprompted that, “You didn’t abandon your post. The only way you could’ve done that is if you went through with what you planned.” The only thought I remembered having was, “Oh my God…can this woman read minds?!”
Don’t abandon your post
I’ve been in therapy for almost a year now. I can’t tell you how much it has helped me. I recall my therapist asking me what I would tell my past self when I was going through my crisis.
I told her that I would tell myself to, “pull it together.”
She told me, with a very stern expression, that I, “most definitely would not tell myself to pull it together. If your friend or loved one was going through a hard time would you tell them to ‘pull it together?’”
When she put it like that, I recognized how big of an asshole I must have sounded. I would never have told someone who was going through that to ‘pull it together.’ I would do what my boss and so many others did for me, wrap my arms around them and be there for them. Maybe we’re afraid that others will tell us that because that’s what we’re telling ourselves. The truth is we’re far harder on ourselves than any other person out there.
I’ve learned that talking about things helps me process things. I’ve learned that writing things helps even more.
For those of you with the means, I think therapy can benefit literally everyone. You are able to bring the unconscious into the conscious and make an informed decision on it. I won’t tell you to bottle things up and not talk to your family, but I know how we men are. If that’s the case, then talk to a therapist. It’s literally their job to be talked to. Sometimes they can help lend a hand to pull you out of your funk. Medication can help too.
The thing is, after you go through something of a crisis you will always come out the backend stronger and maybe a bit wiser too.
Your Post is Where You’re Loved
I hardly wrote more than a few hundred words of my novel while I was deployed.
Its hard to be imaginative or think in abstract ways when you’re depressed. When you’re going through a mental health crisis, you really can’t think straight. That’s a generous way of saying that your decision-making abilities are completely compromised.
That makes a lot of sense seeing it written down in black and white, but while you’re experiencing it you think it’s your fault and that there’s something wrong with you. I hope you’ve now learned that that is simply not the case.
You are loved and deserving of love.
Today my novel is complete at 85000 words. I literally wrote 75000 words in three months after returning home. I didn’t even think that was possible! Now I’m trying to pitch it to agents and publishers to get it published.
Somebody pinch me.
I started a YouTube Channel and a blog (Hi! 😃) where I write about everything from: the art and science of writing, AI, and occasionally about mental health. Happy Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month by the way.
And I hug my kids just a little tighter than I did before.
I’m right where I should be.
Don’t abandon your post. That’s an order. You’re needed where you’re loved.
