The mental health and psychosocial support provided by the system is pretty inadequate.

Most of the time there’s no support at all. So that’s that.

And when there is support, it’s quite often completely beside the point.

I remember receiving “Happiness calendars” from the staff welfare office, and other cheesy emails from the counselors.

It’s cute and all, but when you’re:

• overworked and stressed, butting heads with the office jerk,

• in the middle or nowhere, with limited freedom of movement,

• missing a friend’s wedding for the third time

• just broken up with your partner because long-distance was too hard,

• eating rice for the 5th week in a row, and having no energy to work out,

• with 27 mosquito bites on each leg, wondering when you’ll catch malaria or typhoid again

  … Let’s just say the “Happiness Calendar” can suck it.

I had to figure out on my own how to be ok.

• How to be ok and keep going when I felt like I was choking under the weight of my to-do list, because there are simply not enough hours in one day to deliver all the work and value required.

• How to be ok and keep going when I was mentally and physically exhausted.

• How to be ok and keep going when a nasty colleague — or office/inter-agency politics — poisoned the working environment, slowing down our ability to deliver, day after day.

• How to be ok and keep going when I felt that nagging disconnect between my personal values and the way I was asked to do my job.

• How to be ok and keep going when the sadness and guilt overwhelmed me, as I contemplated how tiny a drop in the bucket the aid we were offering actually represented.

• How to be ok and keep going when my deployments made my relationships with my partner, my parents and my friends back home too complicated to handle.

• How to be ok and keep going when there was ongoing fighting outside our compound and we were afraid.

• How to be ok and keep going when colleagues were killed and abducted while serving, and the pain became paralyzing.

• How to be ok and keep going when I went home for R&R and people called me a “hero” and “amazing” and I felt like an imposter.

• How to be ok and keep going when I left the front lines and couldn’t find a way to readjust to my comfortable life-style and an HQ working environment — when depression took over for months.

And well… I did figure it out.

I felt therapy wasn’t for me because I didn’t feel fundamentally broken or needing to be “fixed”. I just needed help to learn to manage challenges better.

Through self-development books, useful posts on social media and a ton of work on myself, I found simple but effective answers to my problems.

I learned to manage my thoughts and my emotions, so they would support me, instead of keeping me stuck.

I rewired myself entirely.

Slowly and profoundly, things across all areas of life became easier to handle.

I started becoming who I wanted to be.

With a life that actually fit me.

I wanted to share these tools and breakthroughs with as many people as possible, so I became a certified professional life coach and created the Rewired For Good podcast.