Owning Your Life

To own your life is to be in charge of it while acting responsibly. Once you’re capable of making sound decisions, deciding what you want to do is the mission, followed by a plan. Having a say in your life means you have arrived and can shape your circumstances and your conditions. As veterans, the fight we all own is maintaining our freedom of thought and the ability to choose what we want to do. As veterans, we fought to reassert ourselves into a society that didn’t like us, adding to depression and acute anxiety. Trying to adjust to a world we left to serve, our country turned its back and treated us like strangers. Filled with regret and confusion, we were nearly unable to reestablish ourselves. The civility we all thought of coming back to was nothing short of chaos and utter bias. I truly believed that once I returned to the world I had left, it would be that manna from heaven I could feast on and regain my rightful place, which didn’t happen. Instead, it took years for me to work myself into a lifestyle worthy of my sacrifices.

Having been a civilian living a life I grew up with was the world I accepted, because that was all I knew at the time. However, the military taught me a different life that demanded discipline, dedication, commitment, and loyalty. There were no concessions on this level because you either followed those demands or were dishonorably discharged or placed in the brig. Instead, rules and obligations were established by every member, leaving no room for indecision or non-compliance. 

The modesty about or criticism of ourselves feeds into the ideology of trauma. People who are seriously traumatized feel unsafe in their bodies because the past is alive, and doling out demands to behave in a certain way creates deep discomfort. The human psyche is forever plagued by the all-too-clear warning signs that haunt us daily. To live this existence, veterans become experts in ignoring their gut feelings to remain safe. The more people, and veterans, in particular, succumb to signs of no control and not fitting in, the more likely these signs will take over, leaving all in the wake of increased depression and hopelessness. The outcome is a sensory shift, either shutting down or going into a panic, which consequently develops a fear of fear itself.