💔 Thunder Shook: The Day After Discharge

Discharged, unraveling, and still fighting to survive.

I didn’t come home to family. Or friends. I came home alone—after eight years, it was all just gone.

One day after discharge, I started crying—and didn’t stop.

The next day, I woke up already in tears. That was Day Two. The same day the medal showed up on my doorstep.

No ceremony. No handshake. Just a cold, padded envelope—like a thank-you note from a job that had already erased me. Inside was my second Navy Achievement Medal.

I hadn’t even known it was coming. That made it worse.

I held it in my hand—shiny, official, meaningless.

How could I be unraveling like this while the Navy was still sending me medals? The same Navy I felt had betrayed me.

Nothing made sense.

I had poured myself into that work. Fought for it. Bled for it. And now it was just… over.

I was unraveling and didn’t know it yet.

PTSD. Major depressive disorder. Surgical menopause. No one had given me the hormones that might’ve cushioned the fall.

That first week, I looked at my closet and saw my uniforms—and in a frenzy, I threw them all out. My sea bag. My socks. Everything.

I regretted it later. I had no job. Barely any civilian clothes. But at the time, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was just trying to survive.

By Day Four, I couldn’t take being so close to the Navy. That night, I threw what little I owned into a friend’s van and drove six hours north to Palo Alto.

I got there around 2 a.m. on Day Five. I pulled into the driveway of a couple I knew.

I sat there for hours—crying, chain-smoking—waiting for the sun to come up.

When it finally did, I knocked on their door.

When the door opened, I broke down. Couldn’t even speak.

It took nearly an hour before I could say a word. And even then, I couldn’t explain what was happening.

I didn’t know. I only knew one thing: I was losing my mind.

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I’m not sharing this for sympathy.

I’m sharing it for the one who’s still sitting on that couch. The one white-knuckling it minute by minute. The one who thinks it’s only them.

It’s not. You’re not.

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