This is for service members not for spouses.

I miss the subtlety of comic-book villains

"In conclusion, China is a land of contrasts. Thank you."

6 mo post-retirement it's still by default my last resort to take emotional distress or practical daily problems to my husband without exhausting every other solution (a source of huge frustration for him!) because this is an extremely hard behavioral pattern to break--reflexive self sufficiency.

For people whose friends and family may be far away, or lacking the cultural context to understand specific military stressors, this hesitance to put emotional burdens on their spouse can mean they have no outlets at all. Making close friends is a process and moving every few years makes it hard.

Another thing that makes this a uniquely difficult to manage situation for mil spouses is that your partner is often quite literally your only support, yet mil spouses are acutely aware that additional stress on someone going into dangerous situations could potentially be a catastrophic distraction.

The military, last I checked, does not publish statistics on spouse mental health, stress related injuries, or suicides. There is a deeply embedded culture of not complaining--someone always has it worse and more blatantly traumatic. This mass internalization of immense stress can be very damaging.

This experiential saturation tends to pile up--sometimes into a formal C-PTSD diagnosis, and sometimes just in a way that makes you weird at parties. At a point, so many things have happened that it feels impossible to process anything else that's happening and you end up on autopilot.

all these systems need massive reform. but one of the most dumbfounding things about Trump’s buzzsaw approach is how to makes so many of us small-c conservative—trying to preserve the systems we have because of the unconscionable costs of losing them outright—when we’d like to imagine better worlds

Likewise, don't compromise other people's work when you don't have to--that means being smart about data, devices, networks, contacts, etc. and what you risk for all of the people connected to you when you take risks involving a police state. Do what you've gotta do, but be smart is all I'm saying.