I think my service has destroyed me.

It's been a little over a month, and yet already its begun. I can feel it; welling up in my chest and consuming my limbs, this unmistakable restlessness. This... yen. An urge, a push forward, to seek something. I don't know what it is; action? Some sense of glory or heroism? But it's relentless. It's constantly lurking at the back of my mind and it pushes me away from others. I can't find that satisfaction from anyone else; I can't find it talking to some weird person I meet at a market, or chattering about firearms with old cohorts.

No. I can only find it issuing orders. I can only find it standing either on or above the battlefield. I realize that now. There's something inside of me that I'm not sure I can ever get rid of. It overtakes and directs my every thought.

My therapist couldn't tell me exactly what it was, but they identified its cause readily. To them, I supplanted any need for connection and interaction. Instead, I flooded myself with glory, heroism and action. I never stopped to look at the world I was fighting for; I spent almost my entire adult life careening from battlefield to battlefield, with no repose.

Now, anything else seems... mawkish. I don't know. Nothing feels right. I feel uncomfortable trying to connect with those parts of me, because I left them disconnected for so long. I'm scared that I won't ever reconnect with them; and what happens if I don't? Will I forever be a slave to this urge?

Despite all the scars and the trauma, I'm afraid I might never escape what I've inflicted upon myself as my 'duty'. I don't know anything else, and I'm not sure that I ever could know anything else.

Maybe that's just my purpose now. Maybe I'm just a woman of action. Maybe I'm a shell that'll spend the rest of her life looking for a fucking purpose that will never really come to me; something to fill that void in me and finally let me say 'yeah, I've done enough'.

I don't know. They don't know either. I've yet to be told a course of action. My therapist seems to be working hard to figure something out, but even they're perplexed. They told me that I might just have to confront this head on, and work to become comfortable in the ponderous rhythm of civilian life. If not that, the healthiest thing for me, I think, might just be to head out there and hunt that purpose to the ends of this galaxy. If I die trying, then fine.

We'll see.