Page 1041 - Total War on PTSD

BIOGRAPHY
I call what I do ‘caring to make a change’. Any change. I have wanted to make things better in the world since I was a little girl and tried to save earthworms from the sidewalks...not having the heart to leave them to their deaths. I still save spiders instead of killing them and avoid stepping on bugs...and I still save those little, and not so little earthworms from sidewalks once in a while too. It’s not their fault they got a little lost. I wasn’t so nice to roaches. They met their fates in glue traps and underfoot in well-deserved crunchy splats.
I liken this to when I was on deployment, and took possibly undue joy from the knowledge that, at the end of a rocket, deployed by a drone, there would be a well-deserved ‘splat’, or at the least some very bad injuries, for any one who was found at the coordinates from which the rockets were being fired. In my mind I thought of this as the Decon formation. It meant there was one less asshole killing and injuring the people I served alongside. It was one less chance that I could also get killed too. It was one less splat on our side of the fence.
The same can be said for those with PTSD. It’s not their fault. PTSD, in any form, and from any cause, is not their fault. Mine potentially originated from issues in childhood and bloomed into a full-fledged wildflower patch of issues when I deployed to Afghanistan. It was after that deployment that I sustained a TBI, brain lesions and had to deal with a bunch of other health related issues that flowered out of a now fertile medical ground of injury (moral, mental and otherwise), pain and anguish. While I am dealing much better with my ‘flowers’ now, and able to ‘pick some of them’ to place in a vase and enjoy, I still deal with significant issues.
One thing that has always helped me, especially during my almost 15 years in the Navy, during which I advanced from 3rd Class Petty Officer (Yeoman) to Chief Petty Officer E7 and then Limited Duty Officer (Lieutenant Junior Grade) O2; was being able to help...to guide others, along their own path. To help them off the sidewalks, so to speak. Not that I am calling anyone a worm...just using an analogy.
Through the years, since I was only a junior Petty Officer, I chose to mentor others in their own careers, to help them to advance. I started by helping develop study guides, then group training sessions that I conducted, then rotational training sessions so others would also be engaged, and so on. That expanded into a Navy Mentor website that I singlehandedly managed for four years. I picked up a highly competitive assignment as a Navy Leadership facilitator as a First Class Petty Officer (which was an additional duty assignment as I was in the Navy Reserve at that time).
This allowed me to expand my abilities and reach even more individuals, along with a co- facilitator, teaching leadership concepts and providing mentorship to future Navy leaders in both the Active and Reserve Navy sectors. It was one of my most meaningful assignments aside from my Afghanistan deployment.
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