Armistice

(This piece was inspired by the experiences I’ve had supporting a number of Serving individuals, both Military and Police with PTSD and trauma. A testimonial of my own reflecting their stories and the challenges they have faced)

There is a space, long after the battlefield has been left behind, when the war continues, no longer in the world, but in the body. The vigilance does not fade, the readiness does not lower, the enemy remains, but now it wears no face. The mind knows the fight is over.

The body does not.

And so, the soldier does not take off the uniform. Not truly. It lingers in the muscles, in the breath held too long, in the way the eyes scan every room. There is no clear front line anymore, but the battlefield has not disappeared. It has only moved inward.

This is a particular kind of exile. To have survived, but not to have returned. To be home, but never at ease.     To live with a war that no one else can see.

But listen: even the longest conflict  must end. Even the most fortified city must one day open its gates. The world no longer asks for your defense. It asks for your presence. And presence is not vigilance. It is not readiness. It is not the clenched jaw or the scanning eyes. Presence is the slow, deliberate act of stepping beyond survival. It is the terrifying, necessary courage of laying down arms, not in defeat, but in the quiet recognition that the fight is no longer yours to carry.

Forgiveness is not foregoing. It is not absolution. It is the recognition that you can no longer afford to be an enemy to yourself. That the body, so long held in the grip of conflict, deserves another kind of life.

To step into this life will feel like falling at first. Like a dangerous mistake. But this is only the mind struggling to believe that peace is possible.

It is possible.

Not all at once, not in a single moment, but in the slow unwinding of all that was held too tightly for too long.

There is a place beyond the battlefield. A spaciousness where the air does not demand your vigilance. Where the earth holds you without condition. Where you are not a soldier, nor a survivor, nor a haunted man.

You are simply here.

And here is enough.