Deployment to Afghanistan has one similarity to this pandemic: it is an isolating situation with totally different norms, rules, and problems than everyday life at home (1/)pic.twitter.com/qrKq9JWVD5
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At first, it just feels weird. After all, it's only a year. And everyone at home is doing all their at-home shit, and you'll be home soon enough, no big deal Eventually, though, a switch flips. On my FOB, it happened right around the three-month mark (2/)
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Your brain, which has experienced deployment every day for a long time, adjusts to this new normal. "Normal" life becomes a foreign memory, and not something that feels real or even possible to return to (3/)
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Intellectually, of course, you know it will end. But you don't believe it. You adjust, completely This is around the time shit gets weird (4/)
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I transformed from "a chick" to "one of the only available mating partners and surely the hottest woman ever to walk the earth": not as fun as it sounds. Personal conflicts escalated. The monotony was unbearable. Tempers flared. People started going a little bit crazy (5/)
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I am telling you this because it's going to happen to us--probably sooner than 3 months In Afghanistan, we were lucky enough to know that the "normal" world still existed: we don't have that right now. We could call home, get pictures, etc (6/)
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The closest thing we have to that this time is all the incongruous advertisements left over from the world a month ago, but they seem weirder every day and eventually will seem as foreign as adverts from another country 50 years ago (7/)
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The only advice I can offer is to ground yourself to something if you can. The natural world. A hobby that means something to you. Something creative. Books, stories, anything that endures (8/)
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Personal relationships are also important, of course, but they cannot anchor us to a different kind of time. You need something stable and enduring. Something that was here before the outbreak and will be here still after it ends (9/9)pic.twitter.com/9b9q9bLmSt
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