*I started writing this a few days ago but it took me til today to finish it.*

I felt it a little this morning. My fingers didn’t feel totally correct, like the tips didn’t have full feeling. When I started to drive, I knew something was wrong. My mind was ready to just drift off, my eyes were extra slow to focus. I usually only had these issues when I’m about to go down the dissociative rabbit hole. What was happening? Then I realized it’s almost May.

Ahhh May, some years are a better and others are worse. Last year, I almost made it through the month unscathed. Apparently, this year my mind is determined that won’t happen again. I often wonder why my brain fixates so much on the month and not the terrible things that happened in it. My body knows when May approaches more than it really understands why. I didn’t know until more recently that PTSD can be triggered by more than just taste, touch, smell, sound, but that non-physical things such as time of day or month could be just as triggering.

I realize that some bad things happened in May, like riots and two friends’ deaths, which were awful, but I don’t get why the whole month is a struggle. Riots happened in January, February, March, April, June, and most of the other months and I’m fine for most of them. People dying is awful but not unexpected in a war, and it didn’t even happen at the base I was in. So why did my brain pick the merry month of May?

It didn’t take too long for me to get my answer.

May is where I decided to be a monster. It’s where I gave up trying to be a decent person and embraced hatred. It’s also the point in my deployment that I began to tell myself I would never leave Bucca alive. I would live and die in Bucca, so why worry about my actions. I would never have to answer for them.

This is where the brain snap began. A part of me did die; it took a long time for me to not be angry that I was still alive.

Yet God isn’t content to just let me live in those memories. He has given me a new brain, a healed one that doesn’t think or act like a monster. Instead of paying for my actions, He gave me life. Maybe that’s why it’s a struggle at times, because I get to choose Him over May and all its failures. One could even say the struggling is a sign that healing is happening; cracks are being knit back together.

It’s not easy and sometimes I mess it up, but at least I’m free to decide.