The Questions I've Spent Years Trying to Answer

There were two questions that followed me for years. They followed me through recovery, but they were not limited to it. They were constant.

Why am I like this?

Why am I not normal?

They weren't clinical questions. They were more basic than that. Almost philosophical. I carried a quiet, persistent sense that something fundamental about me no longer matched the life I was living or the person I was supposed to be.

Sometimes those questions took a smaller form:

Why is this bothering me?

But underneath was the same need to understand why my reaction to a moment often felt larger than the moment itself. For a long time, I didn't know how to do that.

One of the first experiences that later became important happened in a grocery store shortly after I returned home from Iraq.

The lights felt too bright. People felt too close. Every sound seemed to arrive at once. I stood in the middle of an aisle staring at the shelves, unable to focus on what I had come to buy.

Then I left.

I put down the basket, walked to my car, and sat in the parking lot trying to understand what had just happened. At the time, all I knew was that something felt wrong.

I told myself it was stress, that I was still adjusting, that it was nothing.

Years later, I could see that moment differently. My body had reacted to the grocery store as if I were standing in an Iraqi market before my mind ever caught up. Something in me was responding to experiences I had carried home, even though I didn't understand the connection yet.

I couldn't have explained that to anyone in the parking lot. I couldn't explain it to myself.

I didn't begin writing consistently until I entered therapy. Writing by hand slowed my thinking down. My mind couldn't move as quickly as it normally did. My hand would begin moving before I had organized an explanation or decided what something was supposed to mean.

I wasn't trying to produce anything worth reading. I was trying to capture what was happening before I explained it away.

Then I would go back and read what I had written. That was when the real work began.

Why am I like this?

I didn't ask that question once and arrive at an answer. I asked it thousands of times over many years. Most days, it felt as though I was collecting only a millimeter of understanding at a time.

I looked for patterns, connections, and contradictions—anything that might help me understand why what I was experiencing inside often didn't match what people saw from the outside.

From the outside, there were times I probably looked quiet, distant, or withdrawn.

From the inside, I was working.

I was sitting with thoughts I couldn't explain, trying to understand why simple moments stayed with me long after they ended and noticing the difference between what I knew and what I felt.

That work was exhausting—not because writing was difficult, but because writing made it harder to look away.

After therapy ended in 2017, I continued to journal and use the coping mechanisms I had learned in the room. My focus became sharper. I started paying closer attention to what my body did in the seconds before my thoughts went dark and to what was quietly pulling me out of the present.

Tracking those small shifts wore me down in a way sleep never fixed.

The irritation people could see was rarely the whole story. Underneath it, I began finding guilt, fear, and an exhaustion that lived deeper than fatigue. I also found how much energy I was spending trying to contain it all—trying to keep the people I loved from carrying what I was carrying.

None of those realizations arrived as a breakthrough. They accumulated because I kept paying attention.

Those same questions run through my memoir The War After. They sit underneath the grocery-store moment, the years of therapy, and the quieter work that continued long after therapy ended.

That is why I continue to write.

My experience is not everyone's experience. I can only speak honestly about what happened inside me and what it took to begin understanding it.

For years, I lived inside reactions I couldn't name. Writing gave me a way to stop, look at them, and ask the questions I had avoided by telling myself I was fine.

Why am I like this?

Why am I not normal?

It took me years just to develop enough language to begin trying to form the answers. I'm still forming them.

But over time, the question began to change. Instead of asking what was wrong with me, I started asking:

Why is this bothering me?

That question finally gave me somewhere to look.