Prioritizing My Mind

After I finished my time with the military, I felt pretty lost in the world. I felt like I was disassociating and just shutting people out of my life. Therapy helped me to understand that I'm not too much, and I can express what I need. I'm Yun, and this is how therapy changed my life. I grew up in an immigrant family. So we came from Japan, and I'm technically what's called issei, or first generation. The thought of even approaching mental health or even talking about our emotions with my grandfather or my father, it's not even a topic that we would think of to even approach. They think it's like just bullshit, to be honest. I always wanted to join the military ever since I was a young kid. It's something that my dad did, my grandfather did. My grandfather served in the Korean War, and he was a fighter pilot and he was a huge inspiration to me. He showed me that if you work hard and you really put your heart and soul into something, you can make things happen. Afterwards, he became an opera singer, and to this day he's still one of the biggest inspirations to me. Growing up, I went to church on my own because I found a youth fellowship there. I think I still was looking for something that's more of like a true brotherhood, and that's kind of why I enlisted into the military. I decided I just want to do my part as well, join this brotherhood that's called the Army. The general lifestyle of the military's probably not suited for most people. It's high-intensity, high-stress. While you're in the training environment, they'll tell you, "Take your weakness and shove it in." It's instilled pretty early on of like, "Don't be weak, and don't let other people see that you're weak or that you're a liability." I was a civil affairs medic. I deployed twice within a span of a year and a half, and with that it's just this high, we call it like op tempo, where you're just training up, you're getting prepped, and then you're deploying. You come back, you have a downtime, and then you prep, do the same exact cycle, and it's all just super high-intensity, super go, go, go. When I was in the military, I genuinely had no idea of all the things that I was experiencing. Like, I couldn't think, "Oh, that's depression," or "Oh, that's anxiety," or "Oh, that's my PTSD." Especially as a medic, what I'm going through isn't prioritized. What's prioritized is what other people are going through, and I think for a long time that is something that I've kind of instilled into myself of like, "I'm nervous, but I can't show that I'm nervous because that'll make the other person nervous, so I'm just gonna hold that in." When I got home afterwards, I couldn't process how exhausted I was, not just physically but mentally....