How many times have I mourned the loss of me? Twenty or thirty times? Maybe more. No, I have never died, watched my body from above only to come back from the unliving and mourn my own loss. Wait, maybe I have. Maybe we all have. Maybe you have mourned the loss of you.
As Veterans, many feel a tremendous loss of identity when they leave the military service. If you have followed my blog before, you know I talk about 3 chapters in your lives. Chapter 1, your childhood, the time before you served. Chapter 2, your years or decades in the military. And Chapter 3, your time after the uniform comes off. Leaving Chapter 2, many Veterans struggle with identity because you were just part of a great thing where your whole identity, your understanding of you as a person, was clearly identified; you were Warriors, brave and true.
Leaving service, many of you feel you are no longer a Warrior, putzing away at some meaningless job with meaningless relationships, doing little for the greater good. Have you lost your identity, or are you simply mourning the loss of you? Are you mourning the loss of the great Warrior you believed yourselves to be, a camouflage superhero?
I am fortunate to have done a bunch of cool things in my life, including serving for almost 23 years in the military. I climbed North America’s tallest mountain, Denali. I founded and ran a nonprofit for Veterans for almost a decade, raising half a million dollars for them. I raised a child. I served my brethren as a government civilian, fielding combat equipment to our warfighters for almost 10 years. I volunteered for a disaster response organization, deploying a dozen times for a week or more to help those caught in the wake of hurricanes or tornadoes, while also developing a leadership training program for their nearly 200,000 volunteers. I say these things, not as some flex, but as an example to set the stage for what happened when I was done doing those things. I mourned the loss of me.
I mourned the loss of who I was when I was done doing those things. The guy who worked late hours. The guy who led great people. The guy who served the greater good. The guy who gave selflessly to the point of temporary or permanent pain. The guy who had two concerns: the mission and the people doing the mission. The guy who was willing to miss everything else to get shit done.
In the military and in the disaster organization, we talked about post-deployment blues. We talked about how, after all the excitement and greatness of those missions, when you went home and took off your uniform after serving with great humans, you felt depressed, moody, or sad. Yes, not only were you sad that you weren’t out there on the real or proverbial battlefield saving or fixing things, but you mourned the loss of you.
You don’t have to be a Service member to feel this way. If you have achieved any accomplishments, you may feel this loss afterward. Maybe you trained for a year to run a marathon or did a bodybuilding competition. Or maybe you raised a child to the age where they could move out on their own. Maybe you built a house or managed some huge project at work. Maybe you worked at a company for 20 years. Maybe you taught a group of kids for an entire year in school. Maybe you sailed across the Pacific. At the end, when all the fanfare was done, did you mourn the loss of you?
Were you sad because it was over or because you were no longer that person. Were you no longer the person who trained for the marathon, having done it? We’re you no longer an 8th grade teacher, the kids having graduated? Or any of those things I mentioned. We build identity in the things we do, the titles we or society puts on us, the a-through-z planning and execution of things. And then, they are done. Your child heads off to college or, as in the case of my brethren, the uniform comes off.
We then get stuck in this grief, thinking our lives are meaningless; we don’t know how to move forward; we don’t know who we are; we don’t know what to do. We get stuck. Some of us will perpetually chase that high of accomplishment, hoping it will be enough this time. Some of us will drown our thoughts in alcohol or drugs. Some of us will decide that there is no way we will ever feel that way again, so why bother trying? Some will choose a permanent solution to this temporary problem. And then others will mourn your loss.
So, what can we do? First, we start by understanding that your life moves on and you are still you. The thing you accomplished is still a part of you; your next chapter is waiting to be written. That thing you did was just a chapter in the book of you. That a-through z planning is really a-through-whenever planning; whenever being a place at the end of eternity. Then, we realize that there is nothing to mourn because nothing was lost.
As Veterans, we didn’t turn in who we were when we turned in our canteen and body armor to the supply guy and handed off our ID card to admin. We turned in things and WE walked away, intact. Nobody made us turn in our accomplishments, our skills, our character, our morals, our desire to help, our integrity, or anything else that we refined in the military. We just turned a page. But, just like reading a book, when you turn the page, the last page doesn’t disappear, it is still there to look back on, to laugh about, to remember, fondly. It is still part of the book of you. Stop thinking those old pages are torn out.
The book of you will never stop being written. Who you are in each sentence, each paragraph, each page, and each chapter carries over to the next. So, keep moving, keep writing, and keep doing. But please, stop mourning the loss of you!
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—SGM DTB—
