Page 1038 - Total War on PTSD
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 PHOTO CREDIT: CHRIS TILLEY/FLORIDA WEEKLY
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





























































































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