Maybe it’s week three. Maybe it’s hour seven. But at some point during deployment, something in your brain just… snaps.
You’ve been “holding it together” on the outside. But inside? Inside, you’re slowly unraveling to the soundtrack of a dripping faucet, a barking dog, and the echo of your own over-functioning mind that just will not quit.
And then suddenly you’re whispering, “I’ll feel better if the hallway is sage” in the middle of the Home Depot. And you will. For a minute. But then reality will sink right back in (because it always does), and you’ll remember that you’re on your own for however long.
And that however long is, well, a long time.
Especially if this is your first deployment spiral.
Let’s talk about the chaos. And why it makes total sense.
The spiral hits hard and fast.
It starts with something small. A late-night Amazon order. A sudden need to clean the baseboards. The unshakeable feeling that you must go back to the Home Depot, right now, because the hallway color is “off.”
You tell yourself it’s normal. You’re adjusting. You’re just “keeping busy” while your partner is away, doing things they can’t really talk about. (And maybe you don’t really want to know.)
Then, suddenly, it’s 2 in the morning and you’re alphabetizing the spice rack while texting someone about fostering a one-eyed kitten named Meatball. You say yes. Obviously. Who doesn’t need a one-eyed kitty named Meatball?
Here to tell you this is not a breakdown. This is deployment. And honestly? It tracks.
Here’s why.
Routine? Never heard of her.
Deployments break your routines, and your body tries to build new ones, fast.
The rhythm of dinners together, shared childcare, weekend plans, someone else taking out the trash—gone. Just poof. Replaced with the weird half-life of “guess I’m doing this alone” and meals that may or may not count as dinner (was that cereal? Again?).
Your brain doesn’t like that. So it fills the space with something. Projects. Purchases. Paint samples. You start meal prepping like a CrossFit influencer or decide your baseboards are a personal insult. Anything to reestablish a sense of control in a world that now runs on uncertainty and phone calls with bad reception.
And the kicker? The military gives your partner a mission, but you don’t get one. So you start inventing your own.
- Alphabetize the pantry.
- Redesign the hallway.
- Adopt a cat you found on Facebook Marketplace.
- Apply to grad school at midnight because… why not?
Doesn’t matter what it is. All that matters is that it anchors you. (Even if that anchor is shaped like a giant Target haul and emotionally fraught power tools).
Spiral stress is low-grade but constant.
Every day brings new uncertainty: Missed calls. Delayed updates. Conversations where you both pretend everything’s fine, even when it’s not.
So your body starts compensating. You can’t fix the silence, but you can clean the grout. You can’t control whether they’re safe, but you can learn to tile a backsplash at midnight.
It’s not dramatic, it’s biological. Your cortisol doesn’t care that it’s “just deployment.” It’s still stressful. And you’re still human.
Also, the dog just threw up and the toddler won’t nap and your neighbor keeps parking too close to your mailbox. You are a goddess of restraint for not screaming into the void daily.
You’re grieving (but no one calls it that).
It’s not like you lost them. But you did lose a shared reality. Your rhythm. Your intimacy. Your teammate.
So yes, there’s grief.
And like any grief, it shows up in weird ways. You cry over a missing sock. You get overly attached to a plant. You spend two hours researching dog beds for the pet you do not yet have. You buy a silk pillowcase because a TikTok said it would fix your skin and your soul.
Grief isn’t linear. It doesn’t look like movie sadness. Sometimes it looks like repainting the bathroom at midnight because something—anything—needs to feel new.
You are the whole infrastructure spiral.
The house. The kids. The dog. The dishes. The schedule. The mail. The holidays. The meltdowns. The logistics. The text threads. The questions you don’t know how to answer. The feelings you don’t get to share.
It’s all on you.
So if you rage-clean the fridge at 1 am or suddenly develop a deep emotional bond with your Dyson—yes. Of course you did. That is the sound of you surviving.
If no one’s told you lately: you’re doing a damn good job holding it all together.
Even when that holding looks like chaos.
Even when it involves a one-eyed kitten named Meatball.
Especially then.
When the spiral becomes a lifestyle.
Eventually, the chaos settles. Sort of. Promise you’ll eventually stop rage-cleaning the fridge. You start using actual plates again. You might even forget what shade the hallway was before it became “sage,” like some kind of haunted interior design decision.
But also:
- You now own six different types of storage bins.
- Your dog has a weighted blanket.
- Your child thinks Meatball has always lived here.
And you might be enrolled in an online grad program you don’t fully remember applying to. So, sure, maybe you spiraled a little. But you spiraled productively. With commitment. With vision. And when they finally walk back through that door and say, “Wait… when did we get a third cat?”
You won’t even blink.
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