Military life is a rollercoaster. You will have your good days and your bad ones. You will have highs and you will have lows. You will be waiting for orders for months and months and then you get them and before you know it you are on a plane headed to your next duty station.
It’s a strange way to live your life, always waiting and then not waiting and hoping and crying and then laughing. Your emotions are all over the place.
When you hit a difficult season of Military life, it can be hard to know what to do. You want to think positively, but doing so is hard. You want to keep busy, but all you really want to do is hide in your bed. You want to remember that this too shall pass but all you see is more lonely nights, more frustrating days, and years of feeling like your life can never be normal again.
So what do you do when you hit this point? What can you do to get out of it?
Find Friends
Find your friends. Maybe you don’t feel like you can see them in person, or maybe they live too far away. You can still connect.
Send a text message, schedule a friend’s Zoom call, or make plans to meet up sometime in the future.
Friends are a must during military life. They can get you through the hard times, and help you make memories together. And they can pull you out when you are feeling like the military is just too much to handle.
Journal Journal Journal
If you don’t already keep a journal, why not start? Pick out a new journal, and just start writing. You can make it the way you want, and just write out your feelings.
The best thing about journaling is that no one can judge what you write. And putting things down on paper can help you get to a better place. A journal is a must during a deployment, or anytime the military is driving you crazy.
Remember the Past
Remember what you have been through before. A long deployment? A move to a place you never wanted to go? And think about how you got through all of that.
When you remember what you have been through, it makes it easier to go through something else in the future. You are strong, and you can look back and see evidence of that. You might just need a reminder.
What CAN You Change
In the end, you have to figure out what YOU can change and what YOU have control over. So many times in military life we as spouses have zero control, but that doesn’t mean we just have to live with everything the way that it is.
What can we do to make things a little bit easier back at home? What changes can we make to our daily schedules? Once you start looking at what you can change, and work on those things, it makes it a little easier to accept the things you can’t.
