POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER, a living, breathing, emotional condition, is systemic and has affected many war veterans’ lives across history. This mental disorder comes without warning and cripples how you think and why you think. Often, my emotions are attacked. I am sent to a place of depression that I’ve witnessed for over 50+ years. This all-consuming emotional phenomenon that crushes your psyche makes it difficult to interact with other people. Trusting and feelings of guilt run rampant, and coping solutions are hard to come by, even after all these years. As I write this post, June 14, 2017, my feelings of despair attack me again, so I write to stay in touch with those feelings and share my thoughts.
What a lonely time to spend alone with your thoughts, with no one to talk to who can understand, but I also know that no one really can. Thereby, the war veteran is left to either sink or swim in the muddy waters of decision and despair. This lonely travel through waters of high winds and torrential rain is made worse by waves that force you back and impede your progress. When another defeating emotion meets progress, the cycle of behavioral change stops.
For me, the need to stay involved is to stay connected to those who are less fortunate, or enter this life of emotional complexities that carries me a bit further. Others are continually helping me, unbeknownst to them, who seek help, void of the how and the where to find their purpose in life. If I can’t awaken with a reason to live, my emotional demise has been launched, and my physical end will shortly follow.
Learn to live each day by doing something personally productive. Live in the moment and not around the moment. Learn to express your thoughts by writing what you feel, and then challenge those feelings with an alternative that creates inclusion. You must consistently become part of something to see results, and those results can only happen when you stop feeling sorry for yourself. To live healthily, you must think with an unchained strength of self-awareness. Develop a new you by subscribing to a calculating view of inspired words and deeds.
The implications of war is far greater than most could imagine. To assume that this war came with lesser affects, would be the mistake to end all regret.