My six-year-old is home from surgery, and for the next few days, I’m the one managing his pain, his meals, his rest. The surgery still ran long, even after the team decided not to perform two of the procedures we’d prepared for.

My brain keeps reaching for something with real shape to it, a podcast episode, workshop content I’ve been needing to build. What I get instead is five or ten minutes at a time before he needs me again, just enough to start a thought and never enough to finish one.

I feel like a caged squirrel, certain there’s a deep project sitting right there and reduced instead to reactionary, mindless tasks. This has to be temporary, my brain tells me. I am not built to do this forever.

Three mornings in, my teenager woke up early and offered to watch his brother so I could go for a run.

I laced up shoes I hadn’t touched all week. My legs felt heavier than they should have for an easy pace, like the stillness of the week had settled into the muscle itself. A quarter mile in, my chest loosened in a way it hadn’t since the waiting room. My son still needed me. The book, the podcast, none of them had room to happen yet. But in the moments of my feet repeatedly hitting the pavement, something in my body recognized motion again, and for thirty minutes, I felt like myself again. It was glorious.

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Then they ask a follow up question that isn’t really about your job at all. Something like, “so who are you outside of that?” And you go quiet for a second longer than feels comfortable, because you genuinely don’t know how to answer without reaching for another title.

That pause is the tell. It means the answer to “who are you” got built entirely out of the answer to “what do you do,” and nobody noticed until someone else asked the second question out loud.

The Quake

My observation has been that men and women both build identity out of what we do. That part isn’t new. What differs is how it feels once the doing stops.

In the men I’ve watched go through it, this tends to show up in one place at a time. The job goes, and he goes quiet for a time because he doesn’t know who he is without the boots or the badge or the corner office. It’s visible. It has an obvious cause.

In the women I know, myself included, who’ve built a career out of rank, mission, or performance, the same pull runs underneath several roles at once, and it rarely announces itself as a single loss. It shows up as a low hum under everything: the performer, the leader, the one who’s always steady, the one who never asks for help.

Same root. Different texture, at least from where I sit.

What Andy Said

My guest on the show a few weeks back was Andy Stumpf, a former Navy SEAL, six years on SEAL Team Six, a guy who took a bullet on deployment and still went on to write a bestseller. I asked him to rank his own life in order. The teams went to the bottom of the page. Husband and father went to the top.

Near the end of that conversation I asked him what he’d tell a young man trying to figure out who he wants to be. His advice was to be patient. Then he said the line I haven’t stopped turning over since: “You are not what you used to do.”

That sentence works on a career. It works on a rank you no longer hold. It works on a version of yourself you’re grieving right now and haven’t said out loud to anyone.

The Terrain

Here’s where the wilderness comes in, because this isn’t a wound that closes. It’s terrain, and you learn to walk it instead of waiting to get through it.

A wildflower doesn’t grow because the ground was easy. It grows in disturbed soil, cracked pavement, land that just got cleared by fire. The bloom isn’t evidence that the terrain was gentle. It’s evidence that something took root anyway.

That’s not a metaphor I’m reaching for to make this feel better. It’s the actual shape of what happens when your title gets stripped away and you find out something in you is still standing.

You are not the mission you ran. You are not the last rank you held or the org chart you used to sit on. Those things mattered. They are not the whole terrain.

The Assignment

This week, somewhere quiet, write your life in order the way Andy did. Your chronological order, not your resume. What goes at the top if nothing you did for a paycheck, a rank, or a mission counts toward the score?

Sit with what comes up. You might find peace there. You also might find grief showing up, because you were too busy proving something to notice it was missing. Either answer is honest. Neither one needs fixing today.

Where This Leaves Us

I don’t have a clean resolution, and I’m not going to pretend I do. What I can tell you is that my page has room for more than one more line at the top. Yours does too.

I’d love to know where you landed. Hit reply and tell me what went to the top of your page.

Full conversation with Andy Stumpf is Episode 55 of Hardcore and At Ease, wherever you get your podcasts.

Pick up Andy's book, Drownproof: Eight Life Lessons to Keep Your Head Above Water, if this quote hit and you want the whole story behind it.

Keep Your Edge Without Going Over the Edge.

My husband and I were an hour into the surgery block, sitting in the waiting room, when the surgeon walked out early. We recognized her right away because she was the same doctor who’d sat with us before they put our six-year-old under. English was her second language and she did a great job fast-talking us through every risk and every benefit until we understood exactly what we were agreeing to.

Standing in front of us now, she told us they weren’t doing as much as planned. The team elected not to perform the two procedures we’d prepared for. They’d watched his breathing while he was under and found the obstructions weren’t what anyone expected. They decided to pull back instead of push through.

Relief and whiplash arrived in the same breath.

Have you ever braced for the hardest version of something, only to have to recalibrate in real time when it doesn’t come?

The surgery still ran three hours. He still needs a few days where someone is managing pain, meals, and rest, and that someone is me. Right now he’s on the couch, watching something on the screen, playing quietly with whatever’s within reach. I’m circling the house with a laundry basket, wondering what I’m supposed to do with myself.

My husband is at work right now, running his shift as a first responder, and I’m jealous of him in a way that surprised me until I understood where it was coming from. My life has never really settled into one place. It’s been built on mission tempo, one shift to the next, movement as the default setting for as long as I can remember. What’s hard right now isn’t just being the one who stays home. It’s sitting inside a transition point where I can’t see the next step clearly yet. He gets to walk out the door toward a mission he can name. I’m standing in my own hallway, and the mission is blurry.

If this caretaking season is where you're standing right now, I wrote about the terrain underneath it here: The Caretaking Wilderness.

You don’t need a spouse on shift or a child on the couch to know this pull. Maybe your version is a parent who needs you, or a job that requires you to hold the line while your own momentum stalls, or a season where the next mission hasn’t named itself yet.

Whatever shape it takes for you, the question underneath it is the same one I’m sitting with:

This isn’t a task management problem. It’s a purpose problem, and purpose problems don’t resolve the same way.

When do you focus?

When do you shift?

What do you even call the space in between when neither one is fully true yet?

In Formula 1 racing, “box, box, box” is the radio call that means it’s time to come in. Fresh tires. A reset. So you’re ready for the next stretch of the race.

Racing → Pit stop → Racing

Going into the box was never the problem. Staying there without deciding to is.

Racing → Pit stop → Garage

See the difference?

Similar to a pit stop, being “at ease” is supposed to be a state of having relaxed, sustained attention. One foot planted toward what matters, even when you can’t move toward it yet.

Hardcore → Being At Ease → Hardcore

That’s different from switching yourself off and calling it rest. Rest with no direction underneath it starts to feel like disappearing.

Hardcore → Being At Ease → Rest

See the difference?

So the shift isn’t forcing myself back onto the track before it’s my turn to leave. It’s naming the season for what it is. Laundry and food prep and sitting with a kid who needs his mom in the room, that’s not a break from the mission… it’s a pit stop.

For these few days, this pit stop is required for me to continue on my mission of being Hardcore (which at this phase of my life is the goal of getting my book published). I anticipate heading back onto the track come Tuesday. But for now, whether I like it or not, this pit stop is required.

Now, what happens if my son’s recovery goes longer than anticipated, or complications arise? Well, at that point, it might become the mission (the thing I have to be hardcore focused on) - but we’re not there yet, so my mindset shouldn’t be there either.

That’s called anxiety.

My teenager just woke up and offered to watch his brother for thirty minutes so I can get a run in. Thirty minutes isn’t the thirty mile hike my soul is crying for, but it’s enough to remind my body what motion feels like, and it will let me walk back into this duty day feeling more like myself.

I have to let these small steps in the pit stop count. Self care needs to be happening in all phases of life - yes, when you’re hardcore on mission, running your race… yes, when you’re in a pit stop, getting things ready again… yes, even when you’re at rest, recalibrating what’s to come.

If I were to give up intentional self care, I would be standing still through the whole season instead of moving through it. So I’m taking the run. I’m coming back. And I’m choosing to stay in the box on purpose, for as long as this recovery needs me here, because showing up consistently for the space my mind keeps rejecting is its own kind of discipline.

If you’re in your own version of this right now, you might not have the language for it either. That’s alright. Naming the season honestly is further than most people get.

This Tuesday marks one year of my video podcast, Hardcore and At Ease; fifty-five episodes, no gaps. Episode 56 is where I finally say some of what I’ve been circling for a year, including this. If you’ve ever done the smallest version of yourself in a room while your mind ran laps somewhere else, that episode is for you too.

[LISTEN TUESDAY]

So the next time you notice yourself being at ease, picture the pit stop too. Watch for the reason you pulled in. Then time how long you stay. The box only works if you know why you're in it and how long this season calls for it.

Then make the call; are you heading back into the race, or pulling into the garage?

Frame the Terrain. Name Your Flower. Nourish Your Flourish.

She was already nervous about delivering brand new material to a room full of strangers, and now the one piece of her brother’s funeral she couldn’t control was still up in the air. She let herself panic for a minute. Then her daughter talked her down. The Navy’s honor guard called back to confirm 15 minutes before Michele walked on stage, and she gave the talk carrying the whole week with her.

Here’s why you stayed with that story:

A cemetery call means nothing to you on its own. What kept you reading was the clock running (90 minutes, then 15), one real question left open until the last line (would the flag get confirmed in time), and a detail you could picture, the phone ringing before she’d even loaded her slides. Pull any one of those pieces out and the same story goes flat.

That’s craft, not luck and not oversharing.

Someone chose that detail on purpose and shaped it until it landed exactly the way it just did on you.

During a recent leadership meeting, Michele told that story to our team with that same craft.

She chose to keep the fear, the phone call, her daughter steadying her, those 15 minutes of not knowing whether it would come together in time, and she shaped each piece instead of rambling through it. She didn’t give us a vague, safe summary, the one where a woman veteran walks into a room, delivers something excellent, and everyone claps politely and moves on. She gave us the real week, chosen and shaped with care.

That’s a version of success worth naming. Michele also didn’t walk on that stage and recite trauma statistics off a slide. She delivered her material with that same discipline, choosing the real stakes on purpose and shaping them carefully instead of smoothing them into something safe and forgettable. As a result, three women who had never set foot in a women’s conference in their lives walked up to her afterward wanting more of what they had just heard.

Most of us do the opposite. We round ourselves down before anyone even asks us to.

I’m going to show you why the safe, composed version of your story is the one nobody remembers. Then I’ll show you what to do instead, so the next time you open your mouth, whoever is listening leans in instead of quietly checking out.

The Permission Reflex

You picked up this reflex long before you ever put on a uniform, and formation sharpened it into something automatic. You present the mission. You present the outcome. You leave the mess out of it, because that’s what gets a briefing done well.

That instinct is a real skill, and if you’re still in uniform or still reporting to a supervisor, it’s probably one of the reasons they value you. It works beautifully when your job is to deliver information.

However, it starts working against you when it becomes the only way you know how to let someone know you, off the clock, in the relationships where being known is the purpose of the relationship.

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And maybe you haven’t looked that closely at yourself in years.

This isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a direction problem.

You point the skill outward again and again: at the mission, the team, the threat. You almost never point it at yourself. You didn’t forget that you’re needs are in there somewhere, but we prefer to focus on the competence we’ve earned. Looking that closely at ourselves feels like the one assignment we were never trained for.

I sat across from a woman who spent her career doing exactly this professionally. Daina Durham (pronounced “die-na”) went into the Military Police Corps and came out a CID special agent. Her job was investigation: procurement fraud, death, murder, anything at the felony level touching the military. She was the only female agent in an office of about twenty guys, and she learned to read a room the way most of us read a weather forecast: Who’s lying. What’s underneath the story. What doesn’t add up.

She built a career on investigating other people. And when I asked her what took her the longest to face, she didn’t point to a case. She pointed to herself.

Here’s what happened when she finally turned that same skill on her own life, and why the honest look you’re avoiding might be the only thing standing between you and the life you truly want.

I’m going to show you how to take a deep look at what you’ve been avoiding in yourself, before a crisis forces it into view, so you can stop bracing against your own life and start living it.

Naming the Wilderness

Call this one the Unopened File, a phrase borrowed from Daina’s own career. It names the wilderness of knowing exactly how to read everyone else while leaving your own patterns, wounds, and needs unexamined.

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The bonds were real. They were. But they were mission bonds. Built around shared terrain, shared stakes, shared rules of engagement. When the mission ended, something in the architecture of those relationships ended with it.

She did not lose her people. She lost the context that held them.

This is not a story about ingratitude or failure. It is terrain. Out of uniform, the network you built around mission does not automatically transfer to the life you are building now. The people who knew exactly what you were carrying in service often cannot see what you are carrying now. And the people who can see you now often don’t have the context to know what they are looking at.

What women veterans are rarely taught, in any of the programs or transitions or reintegration courses, is how to audit their relationships the same way they’d audit any other resource. Who is equipped for this terrain? Who has what I need for where I’m going? Who am I holding onto because the relationship was real, even when it no longer reaches?

You were trained to build cohesion around a mission. Nobody trained you to build it around yourself.

You know who you are. It’s time you had the space to live it.

I know what it feels like to be buried under someone else’s version of you. To give and give inside relationships where you are always the anchor and never the one being held. To look around at a full life and feel something close to alone. That feeling is not a character flaw. It is information. It is telling you something about the terrain of your relationships and which types are missing.

I’m going to show you how to map the eight types of relationships that carry you, in any terrain, so you can stop wondering why you feel lonely even when you’re surrounded by people, and start building a roster that will move with you. By the end of this post, you will have a framework to see the gaps in your network clearly, name the people who belong on your active roster, and identify the one relationship type you are most likely missing.

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At 5’3”, the PT mat strapped above the pack didn’t clear behind my neck the way it did on the taller soldiers around me. It sat higher, a full three inches above my head. It pushed my Kevlar helmet forward. Not dramatically, just enough to tip the whole load forward, force my neck into a sustained angle, and make looking straight ahead a constant physical fight against the weight of everything strapped to my back. I looked, in other words, like a video game mushroom man. Jump-on-able. My drill sergeant did not find this charming.

I held the position anyway. That is what you do.

The gear belt had its own personality. My 26-inch waist was smaller than the minimum the system designed for, so the belt didn’t sit snug. It shifted. Over miles it found each hip bone and worked on it; friction that starts as a warning and becomes a fact. I walked like a cowboy for the first few weeks of any field exercise, which, combined with shorter legs requiring more steps to cover the same ground as everyone else, made for a very efficient and also very undignified situation.

The extra pouch I carried had no operational use in my loadout. The configuration existed, the system expected it, so I wore it. You find solutions. Deodorant under the belt line cuts friction better than you’d think. Two sports bras. Sometimes three. You figure it out, say nothing, and keep moving.

That is the pattern. You knew going in this was a male-dominated field. So did I. The field wasn’t the surprise. What accumulates as the surprise: the small daily weight of performing a standard in a body the system hadn’t fully accounted for yet. The accommodations that never get filed. The solutions that never get documented. The physical and operational weight that never gets counted.

This chapter counts it.

Fairness is not the question. What you carried to hold that standard is.

This guide is going to show you

how to name this terrain: the operating condition of serving with a female body in a system built around a male one. Naming it gives you a way to look back at your service without absorbing the gear gaps as personal failure or carrying them forward as grievance. The terrain was what it was. You held it. The system is catching up. None of that changes what your service was, or what it demanded of you to do it well.

This chapter covers what your body was required to do and what the system required of it. What was done to it is a different chapter, for a different day.

Two things happen when women encounter this terrain without language for it. Some absorb it as personal failure: the gear didn’t fit, so something must be wrong with my body. Others flip to the mirror: the gear didn’t fit, so the military failed me, I am owed something. Both responses come from the same root.

Without the name, she fills the gap with either self-blame or resentment.

Neither one tells the whole story.

Self-blame misses the terrain. Resentment misses the fact that you chose this field, you held the standard, and that counts for something the anger tends to bury. Both rob her of the ability to read her own service clearly.

This guide is going to show you how to set down both of those responses and pick up language for what you were in, so that you can look back at your service and be at ease with it: clear-eyed about the terrain, and at peace with the woman who held it.

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The hardest part of this terrain is that it does not look like what we think grief looks like. We have a picture of grief. It is crying. It is the moment of impact, the phone call, the news that stops the room. We think we will recognize it when it arrives because we expect it to announce itself.

It rarely does. It moves in quietly. It borrows other names. And by the time anyone thinks to call it grief, it has been in the room for a long time.

Why This Matters Right Now

Women veterans are navigating multiple simultaneous losses: military identity at separation, peer community that dissolves after service, career transitions that strip credibility built over decades, relationships that could not hold the weight of the uniform or the exit from it. Grief is inside all of that. It has been there the whole time, wearing the names of other things, waiting to be recognized.

We are not here to fix this. We are here to name it. Most of us have been navigating this terrain for a long time without knowing what it was called. This content is here to bring light to something most of us have been moving through in the dark.

Before we go in

I am going to show you how to recognize grief in the places it might be hiding, so that you can stop mistaking its disguises for personal failure and start navigating the terrain you are standing in.

Grief deserves more than one voice. So, I went looking for the people who had spent careers inside this terrain, who had earned their understanding not from a textbook but from the people who trusted them with the hardest moments of their lives.

Major Laverne Santangelo (Ret.) served 23 years as a Military Police officer in the Michigan Army National Guard before earning her Master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling. She built a private practice specializing in grief recovery and holds a certification in grief yoga, trained in somatic approaches to grief processing: the understanding that we carry grief in the body, not only in the mind. She has walked this terrain from both sides, as a clinician and as a woman who lived it unnamed for years before she had the language.

Chaplain Brian Webb (Ret.) served over two decades as an Army chaplain, conducting 79 casualty notifications and more than 40 suicide interventions. He now leads Michigan’s Walking With Warriors program under the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, overseeing a team of veteran navigators serving veterans and military families facing mental health and substance use challenges. He has stood in more doorways of grief than most people will encounter in a lifetime.

Sarah Merwin is a Navy veteran who lost her husband. She did not go looking for a mission after that. The mission found her. She co-founded Holbrook Farms, a lakefront retreat community in Minnesota, because she could see what was missing for women like her, and she was not willing to wait for someone else to build it. For over 12 years, Holbrook Farms has gathered military widows and women who have lost siblings and children in service, and given them something most of them have never had: a room full of people who already know. Sarah sat at the first retreat dinner table herself, planning to hold the container for everyone else in the room. She realized that night that she needed what she had built just as much as anyone sitting across from her. What she has spent 12 years proving is that peer support inside grief is not a lesser version of clinical care. It is something clinical care cannot replicate.

The Grief Wilderness: Naming the Terrain

Grief is any significant loss that changes the shape of your life and leaves you without a map for what comes next.

Sit with the second half of that sentence. That is where this terrain lives.

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She asks if I miss the military.

Something lit up in me when she asked. I was interested. I was ready to talk about it.

I say yes.

And then she starts talking about her daughter.

Her daughter just started bootcamp. She’s proud. She’s nervous. She has questions. Somewhere in the first thirty seconds I stopped being a person in the conversation and became a resource. Someone with relevant experience she could pull from. The subject shifted to her daughter’s branch, her daughter’s timeline, her daughter’s adjustment period. I listened. I encouraged her. I told her the things that would help her sleep at night, because I know what to say and I’m good at saying them.

She never asked about me again.

She wasn’t being rude. She was just a mom who was worried about her kid and I happened to fit the conversation. The military was the topic. I was the backdrop.

I’ll tell you what was at that table. A former Army intelligence officer. Someone who had briefed one-star generals. Who ran all-source intelligence teams across every discipline. Who gave classified briefings ten stories underground in South Korea. Who led security programs for 4,000 soldiers.

None of that was in the room on Easter Sunday. What was in the room: she served. She probably knows about bootcamp.

That is the Civilian Translation Gap. It shows up at dinner tables and job interviews and school pickups and playdates. It is not a resume problem. It is not a communication problem. It is a terrain problem, and it follows you into every room where the people around you have no real framework for what you are.

I want to tell you about a friend of mine. I’ll call her Quinn. She and her husband both served active duty Army. She’s one of the most socially fluent people I know, lit up by conversation the way some people are lit up by mission.

Quinn would have had a completely different Easter.

She wouldn’t have felt the puzzle piece problem. She would have leaned into that mom’s world, asked real questions about her daughter, found something worth being curious about in the pride and the fear and the not-knowing. She would have left that conversation feeling like she gave something to it. And she would have meant it.

That’s Quinn choosing where to put her attention. She has let go of the expectation of being the center of the conversation and found something real in serving the one that actually started.

I’m a Sunflower with Primrose tendencies. Quinn reads more like a Daisy, someone who moves fluidly between people and finds genuine connection in meeting others where they are. That orientation comes more naturally to her than it does to me.

Quinn’s response is a choice, not just a pattern. And so is mine. The terrain is the same. What we bring to it, and what we decide to do once we’re standing in it, that part belongs to us.

I’m going to show you how to name this terrain so you can stop diagnosing yourself as the problem, recognize the double bind for what it is, and find the rooms that can actually hold you.

If you read the original Civilian Translation Gap post, you named the terrain. This one goes somewhere the first post didn’t: what it looks like from the inside of a single conversation, and how two women veterans can stand in the same room and come away with completely different experiences of it.

Before we go further, I want to name something. The Easter conversation didn’t need to be about me. My military experience isn’t more important than a nap schedule or a worried mom or the ordinary things people talk about at family gatherings.

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My spouse was deployed overseas. I had arranged care for my son, the first time I’d left him since he was born, so I could fly to Charleston for an interview at another television station. They had reached out because my record at the Columbus station indicated I was ready for a larger market. They paid for my flight, and I was happy to accept the interview, knowing that I had earned that call. Standing at that sink counter doing what needed to be done before I could board, I was already the answer to the question the interview hadn’t asked yet.

The news director picked me up from the airport and we talked shop the whole drive over, the easy back-and-forth of two people in the same industry sizing each other up before the formal part begins. I felt good walking in. The general manager’s office was a square room with windows across the entire back wall overlooking a pond with a fountain. He had a stack of papers in his hand when I sat down across from him. I assumed it was my resume. He looked it over for a moment, then looked up at me and said something I had genuinely never heard from anyone in any professional setting in my life.

I remember taking in his office. A square room. A man sitting squarely inside it, behind a square desk, asking me whether I was capable of thinking outside of a box. I had built my entire intelligence career on creative problem-solving in high risk situations. Surely he was joking, I thought, only he looked completely serious, so I answered him directly: “With all due respect, Sir, it’s quite the opposite. The military doesn’t care how you get the job done, they just want the job done, and figuring out how is a developed skill.” He grunted. I told him that failure is not usually an option, and that leaves a lot of room for Soldiers like me to succeed. I got the job. And I left that room carrying something I didn’t have the words for yet.

At that moment, I was confused that my military experience was being perceived as a bad thing, but as the years went on, I began to see that this man wasn’t alone in his viewpoint.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to recognize the Civilian Translation Gap so you can stop wondering what you did wrong and start reading the terrain for what it actually is. I’m going to name both sides of the bind — what it costs to lead with your record in rooms that can’t receive it, and what it costs to leave it behind — so you can see clearly that this was never a you problem. And I’m going to give you language for the pulls that have been working on your root system, because you cannot navigate terrain you haven’t named.

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Whenever he tripped over nothing, an open path, flat ground, no visible reason to go sideways, he would catch himself and say it quietly, mostly to himself: turf smurf.

That was his name for the invisible creature he imagined reaching up from the earth and grabbing his foot just long enough to throw his balance. From across the room, it looked like he was just clumsy. Getting older. Couldn’t keep his balance. But from inside his body, he knew: something had grabbed him. Something real. He just couldn’t prove it to anyone else in the room.

You know this feeling.

Not the dramatic fall. The subtle catch. The day that is harder than it should be with no clean explanation for why. The irritability that doesn’t match the size of the moment. The exhaustion that follows you into a full night of sleep and is still there when you wake up. The small mistake, the kind you never make, that lands heavier than it has any right to.

From the outside, it looks like you’re off. Distracted. Not quite yourself. People draw their own conclusions. She seems tired. Something’s wrong with her. She’s struggling.

From the inside, you know something real is happening. You just can’t name it yet.

That is the wilderness doing what the wilderness does. And the mechanism it uses, the specific way it reaches up and grabs your foot before you can see it coming, has a name.

It’s called a root pull. And every wilderness type has its own.

When you can name which one has you on a given day, you stop bracing blindly. You start moving with your eyes open. That shift, from brace to navigate, is what this framework is built for.

I’m going to show you what a root pull is, how it works inside any wilderness terrain, and how to use it as a diagnostic tool no matter which wilderness has you right now. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to name what type of pull has you on any given day, locate the source in the terrain instead of in yourself, and take one grounded step from where you’re standing.

The wilderness is the terrain. The root pull is what that terrain does to your root system while you’re navigating it. Those are two different things, and knowing which one you’re dealing with on a given day is what makes navigation possible.

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I had a four-month-old at home. I had just accepted a job promotion that required an out-of-state move, which meant temporarily putting my military career on hold to make it happen. My former husband was deployed overseas. My aunt looked at all of that and said, Shelly, you’re so brave. I never could have done what you’re doing. I’d be too scared.

I remember sitting with that for a second. Scared of what?

There was no bravery in it, not the way she meant. There was just forward. Whatever was ahead couldn’t be worse than staying where I was. So I moved.

That’s what we do.

Most people imagine life as a roller coaster; highs and lows, hold on tight, eventually it evens out. And maybe that works for someone. But for us, that’s like calling a puddle the ocean. It doesn’t come close to the depth of what we’re actually living.

Life is a battlefield. A perpetual, ongoing contest between what builds you and what tries to break you. Both sides are always lobbing grenades. Sometimes the path survives the blast and you dust yourself off and keep moving. More often, it’s obliterated. Your bearings are gone. The path isn’t damaged, it doesn’t exist anymore.

And when someone on the outside looks at all of that, what do they say?

“You’ve got a lot going on.”

Like it’s a scheduling problem. Like we chose this. Like there’s a version of us that could have simply opted out.

The choice to step back (to say not my problem) would mean someone else absorbs the impact. And that’s against our moral code. We don’t step up because we’re fearless. We step up because stepping back means someone else gets hurt. That’s the price of selfless ambition. And most of us pay it without thinking twice.

So no. We don’t visit the battlefield. We live there.

And the question nobody has ever answered, for us, about us, with language that actually fits, is what do you do when the path is gone?

You know who you are. It's time you had the space to live it.

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It’s the in-between. The moment after the hard thing, when the dust settles, when the immediate crisis passes, when everyone around you exhales and looks at you expecting you to be fine because you always are; and you realize you have no idea what to do next. Not because you’re lost. Because the version of forward that worked before doesn’t fit anymore, and you haven’t found the new one yet.

So you do what we do. You keep moving. You produce. You perform. You justify your presence with output because that’s what got you here, and stopping feels like falling, and falling feels like failing, and failing is not an option you’ve ever allowed yourself to sit with for very long.

And nobody around you notices, because from the outside you look exactly like yourself.

Here’s the thing about the reflex to push through everything: it works, right up until it doesn’t. And when it stops working, it doesn’t announce itself. It just gets quieter, and heavier, and harder to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived inside the same formation.

Women veterans carry a particular kind of weight that doesn’t translate well. We’ve been in situations where the stakes were real, where the cost of being wrong was measurable, where the pressure to hold it together wasn’t just personal. It was professional, it was relational, it was moral. We learned to move through hard things without flinching because flinching had consequences.

That reflex doesn’t turn off when the context changes. It travels with us. Into jobs, into relationships, into seasons of life that look nothing like what we trained for. And the gap between what we’re actually carrying and what anyone around us understands we’re carrying, well, that gap is its own kind of exhaustion.

We keep moving because we don’t know what else to do. And somewhere underneath all that forward motion, something is quietly asking: is growing supposed to feel like this?

I want to tell you about a whiteboard.

My second son was born with a condition where his soft palate didn’t form, and his jaw developed inside his throat, blocking his airway. He had his first craniofacial surgery before he was twenty-four hours old. My husband rode with him in the ambulance to a different hospital. I couldn’t go until the epidural wore off, so I spent that first night alone in my hospital room, in a building where my baby wasn’t, waiting.

What I didn’t mention yet is that it was the very beginning of COVID. The hospitals were not calm places. And somewhere in the chaos of the delivery, the stress my body had been holding triggered an orbital pseudotumor behind my eye — a mass of inflamed tissue pressing against my optic nerve, stealing the peripheral vision on one side. So here I was, navigating a newborn in crisis, in a pandemic that was starting to crack open around us, and my own body was making the moment worse.

When I finally got to the other hospital, it was loud and fast and nothing like the pictures on the hospital brochures. My husband navigated us to where Oliver was and we stood together next to his incubator. I couldn’t touch him. He was being fed tiny amounts of formula through a syringe pushed into a feeding tube, and the world around him was moving at a pace that felt completely at odds with how still he was.

And then something on the wall caught my eye. Because of my restricted vision, I didn’t see it until it was directly in front of me.

His name — Oliver — written on a whiteboard. And underneath it, one word.

Goal.

I’m a fitness enthusiast. I have a genuine love for goals written on whiteboards. So I leaned in expecting numbers. A weight milestone. A feeding target. Something I could track.

What the nurse had written was one word.

Grow.

In the middle of all of it, the pandemic, the chaos, my own body sending up signals I didn’t have time to deal with, a hospital running at a pace nobody had trained for, Oliver’s only job was to lay there and grow. Not to perform. Not to demonstrate progress. Not to justify the resources being poured into that room. Just grow. Everything else was the terrain. His job was singular.

I’ve thought about that whiteboard a lot since then. Because I think we forget that growing is the goal. Not the output that proves we’re growing. Not the performance of recovery or resilience or having-it-together. Just growing. Coming out the other side of hard terrain more ourselves than when we went in.

But in the middle of one of the most chaotic moments I have ever lived through, the entire space was organized around Oliver doing one thing.

Growing is not a passive thing. It is not weakness dressed up in softer language. It is the whole point.

Oliver turns six this year and starts t-ball in the fall. He is doing just fine.

On Wednesday I’m publishing something I’ve been building toward for a long time: a framework for naming the terrain women veterans move through when the path disappears, the manual doesn’t exist, and every option has a cost attached. It’s called The Wilderness, and it’s the first chapter of something bigger.

If any part of today landed for you, if you felt something shift when you read the word grow, Wednesday was written for you.

Organized the kayaking event down to the last detail. Coordinated the logistics. Set up the lunch so it was ready the moment everyone came off the water. She did a great job. Every detail covered. Everyone taken care of.

Afterward, she was devastated.

Nobody knew. She never said she wanted to be on the water. That small desire stayed quiet, the way small desires do when you have spent years executing for others first. A small desire became a big regret. A big regret fed something she did not have a name for yet.

She chose to serve that day. She chose love over her own desire. The wilderness was not that she served.

The wilderness was that she disappeared inside the serving.

Here is what nobody told her — or you — about caretaking. This is not a soft topic. This is not a chapter about being gentle with yourself. Caretaking is one of the hardest leadership assignments you will ever accept. And like every leadership assignment worth taking, it has terrain that will break you if you enter it without a map.

Most of us didn’t get a map.

We chose the person we love. We said yes to the relationship, the child, the parent, the mission. The wilderness is not that we are trapped. The wilderness is that the depth of what love actually requires was not on the brochure. And nobody told us the season had no finish line.

This post is about how you stay yourself inside the longest assignment of your life.

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You showed up. You performed. You kept your standards when the people around you were letting theirs slip. You were the one in that room people could count on — not because someone was watching, but because that’s who you are.

And then someone accused you of doing something you didn’t do.

Maybe it was a colleague pointing a finger to protect themselves. Maybe it was a rumor with only your name on it. Maybe — and this is the one worth spending real time on — it was the institution itself. A formal process. A procedure designed to find wrongdoing that somehow landed on you.

Here’s what nobody tells you about that moment. The instinct is to fight. Pull out your record, your scores, your reputation. All the evidence that says: this is not who I am.

And the brutal reality of false accusation — especially institutional false accusation — is that evidence doesn’t always move the needle.

You can be believed in the room and still lose the war. You can perform at 100% and still be quietly dismantled. You can tell the truth and still watch it not matter.

This post is not about innocence. The stories I’m going to tell you both involve people who believed me. That’s not what this is about.

This is about what happens to your identity as a leader while you’re waiting for the truth to catch up — and what it costs to carry a false accusation at full performance with no end in sight.

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Not all at once. First, I noticed that they became slow to respond. The normal lunch routine we had going was now consistently interrupted without consistent explanation. The training exercise ended and at the next Battle Assembly, just a few weeks later, I moved my workstation out of cubicle land and into the section’s private office (reserved for the OIC - Officer In Charge). I ate lunch alone on that Saturday, and I remember seeing the Lieutenants heading out together; they were still a crew. I was now “leadership.”

Nobody prepared me for this. I’d spent way longer than most in the rank of First Lieutenant as an unfortunate result of a plethora of administration issues. I knew that I was advancing toward something. Turned out I was also advancing away from people who mattered.

Here’s what I didn’t know then: This is Wilderness—an unwinnable situation, in or out of uniform, where traditional paths don’t work. Here’s the diagnostic: if at least three are true (no map, no training manual, double bind, success metrics collapse, moral dissonance), you’re not failing. You’re in Wilderness.

This one has a name: The Promotion Trap.

You earned the rank. You wanted the responsibility. You know that leadership means getting to do more good work with your team. Instead, the promotion separated you from the exact people who made you promotable. Your old crew treats you like management. Your new peers haven’t decided if you’re “one of them” yet. And you’re standing in the middle, wondering what the crap just happened.

Military structure was present, and yet so was the human experience. Having a crew gives you clarity on exactly who has your back— and mine had just vanished. Here’s what nobody tells you about advancing in rank: You don’t just gain authority. You lose your people. And when you’re someone who built your entire identity on being part of a tight team, you end up exactly where I was—promoted, isolated, wondering, “how long will I be doing this alone?”

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