Road to Recovery
Jordan: So, we left at 3:00 AM from our little outpost, walked out about 400, 600 meters. Mortar struck down at that point, right as we're about to leave. My eardrums both got completely blasted, kind of came to in a daze with just dust and... April 1st is when I got to the Warrior Recovery Center.
A rumor had came out that I threatened to kill myself if I was sent back or something, because that rumor mill had spread so fast a lot of my platoon didn't think that I was trying to be there with them. That just kind of made it even worse. I was like, "I'm not there. I can't be there. They won't let me go there." And that kind of just sent me down a nice spiral at that point of just feeling useless. I was drinking every day. Definitely hit me pretty hard mentally. I was like, "Well, if I stay in here, I'm probably going to hurt myself or someone else, and I don't want to do that."
My name is Jordan. I was in the active duty army and I was a 68 Whiskey, which is a combat medic, and I was in from 2009 to 2013. I was hit with a PTSD one before I even left Afghanistan, because there's a pretty clear and obvious criterion event, and all the fun symptoms that I had with nightmares, poor sleep, really bad affect, substance use, all that stuff.
So, I originally went to the VA and I was trying to find somebody. I was just like, "I know I have ADHD." I'd been diagnosed with it, did all the exams, was on Adderall when I was in the army. I'm just trying to get that restarted, and they're like, "Well, you need to see someone for therapy simultaneously." And I was like, "Well, okay."
I looked up this person, really well known, a lot of people knew him in the University of Washington because he did some adjuncting there as a professor. He worked at the VA, and when him and I started talking, he just had this way of understanding what I was saying without having to dig into all the terminology and what all these acronyms and abbreviations mean. So, it made the conversation go real easy, and then eventually he's like, "So, we haven't really touched on the trauma too much. Do you want to try prolonged exposure?"
Going through that whole process with prolonged exposure really helped me personally desensitize some of the areas that were pretty harmful or triggering. One of the bigger things that I learned was that you have to actually be honest. It's really easy to just kind of sweep things under the rug. Trauma is subjective. It's not this nice objective rubric that you can really define. It treats and interacts and hurts differently for every individual. If you're just burying them down, it's not going to help you, and it's not going to help anyone else because they won't know. I think that was the big lesson that I had.
I think I became a lot closer with a lot of my family members as I got through the treatment because naturally you kind of have to talk about your history and your origin. I don't think I would've done that if I hadn't had some of that mental health stuff actually processed through.
A position popped open at the University of Washington Vet Center, and now I have a full time job. UDub is very much created and centered around a lot of amazing veterans, and I started helping people kind of push towards, if not the VA like the vet center, and there was just so many resources out there to get mental health. I think giving back is just this thing that makes me feel good, and it helps other people, so it's a win-win in that situation.
I just kept getting more involved with different veteran's things, and now it's very much like a key component and critical analysis of my life is this thing that I kind of was willing to dump away and just forget about, and then someone voted me in for a thing, and somehow that created my job, and here I am. There's no shortage of resources. If you need help, it's there, but you can't get help if you don't ask.
