228: What if you grew up with the ghosts of war?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Because so much of my life when I'd seen things happening, I'd been told that it wasn't true, it wasn't really happening. I think my brain kind of formed to think that reality was not real. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 228. What if you grew up with the ghosts of war?

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When I was little, my favorite things were animals, music, and my dad. He was magnanimous. His character was just so large, and it's almost as if the world just couldn't encompass a character so big like his. Just something about him was just magical.

I think I got my love for animals from my dad. He'd come home from work and say, let's go look for puppies and kitties. And I'd be like, yeah, let's go. And so we'd go around the neighborhood looking for lost animals. And I swear, half the time we ended up with animals that probably weren't lost. He actually built a kennel on the side of the house to help the Humane Society and other non-kill shelters just for a place to keep other animals so that they could be adopted out.

He spent a lot of time in the UK. His mother was from England and he was from there. And he grew up in a place where he had tons of family and tons of people that really supported and loved him. And he was very, very happy when he was in England. My grandfather, his father, was a veteran from World War II and actually helped liberate Bergen-Belsen.

From seeing what he'd seen in that camp, it changed him and it kind of turned him to stone. He was very abusive to my grandmother and my father.

When my dad was nine or ten years old, my grandfather told my dad to go to the back of the yard and grab some of the rabbits that they had. And my father always thought of them as pets, but apparently that's not what my grandpa had in mind.

When my dad realized that, you know, my grandpa wanted him to get the rabbits to use for dinner, my dad took them all and put them in a wheelbarrow and ran them to the side of the house and let them out of the fence and freed them. And when he came back in the house, he said he received the worst beating of his life, that he couldn't go to school for two days afterwards. But he was just such a fierce defender of animals that it was worth it to him.

In high school, my dad was already in the United States right after Kennedy was assassinated and the Vietnam War started up. I think there was this feeling that people should have a higher calling and help their country. And I think because my dad's father was a veteran, my dad thought it was something that he should do, kind of a duty to serve.

So he enlisted in Vietnam, much to the dismay of his mother and the rest of the family, because he could have gone back to England no problem. But my dad just felt it was something that he should do. When my dad came back from Vietnam, he was a completely different person.

My dad was in very serious combat and before going into combat they would give them uppers to keep them fighting and I think that's common. But for Vietnam I think that's the first time when they started using these different types of drugs to keep soldiers fighting as long as they could. So obviously a lot of people came back to the United States and were addicted and didn't have any resources when they came back and the same thing happened to my father.

So he was dealing with coming back to a country that didn't have any kind of structure for him, any kind of help. And unfortunately, it's, you know, these Vietnam vets that had to pay the price. So my father came back highly addicted to whatever, uppers or steroids or alcohol, just to be able to function properly.

And when he came back, he actually was still enlisted. And he had the job of taking the remains of soldiers that were coming back to their families. I think he must have been like 20, 21. He'd met my mom in high school.

I think they kind of knew that they would be getting married if my dad made it back from Vietnam. And so even in the state of him being so ruined from this war, my mom was just head over heels in love with my dad because she remembered who he was prior to.

So he got married and they had a son, my brother, and he seemed to be doing okay. He got a job being a foreman. Then I was born in the early 70s after that. My parents, I just always remember they were so into each other, almost as if my brother and I just didn't exist most of the time.

Any day of the week, my mom would just do anything for my dad, which was fine because we would do. He was just that type of a character. But this shadow, it just kind of followed him everywhere.

Probably when I was in the first grade, I started noticing changes with my dad. I don't know, it was almost like he was disappearing on me and I didn't have words for what I was experiencing. And it was scary. My mom being my mom didn't want to address it. And in fact, my whole life, she's never really addressed this.

He would go missing for a couple days, and then when he would come back, I would notice just this change in him that seemed to progressively get worse. And I could always tell when this was happening because his eyes, he always had like these bright blue eyes. But when this transition happened, his eyes just turned this steel gray. He wasn't himself. And I just felt like I was grieving myself.

If he was drunk, he'd be very sloppy. He'd be falling all over the place. If he was high, he would be agitated. He would be trying to take apart walls. He would just, he was more scary. He would go away for a couple days and then late at night at two o'clock in the morning, I would get a knock on my window and it would be him completely wasted and wanting to be let in the house.

Sometimes the police would bring him home. To this day, I still don't know what types of things he got up to, and I'm glad I don't know, but his behavior just progressed into something very wild and something very scary.

My dad had always had different triggers from Vietnam. You know, obviously, like a lot of veterans, he didn't like Fourth of July. He didn't like loud noises. We knew never to walk up on him. He could accidentally punch you if he didn't know that you were there.

My dad became very angry. He would yell a lot. He was very violent. He would throw things. He would push us. He became a monster. The only way I could kind of explain it in my small brain was that he just was possessed by something that it wasn't him.

The amazing thing was that he could be all this kind of craziness for weeks on end. And then just out of the blue, it would be this calmness. And it was just the happiest we could ever be when he stopped. He was just the dad that I remembered.

And with my mother never really recognizing what was going on, I didn't have anybody there to explain to me what was happening. It was just a secret. It was shameful. It just didn't exist. Anytime anybody asks me about my mom, I always say, which is true, she's a very nice person. I mean, she's just very pleasant.

And I think she felt like her job was just to maintain an image that everything was okay, to make everything seem normal. I would be in class and all of a sudden I just felt this sadness just wipe over me, just out of the blue. And I would go to the back of the class. We had these coat closets. And I would just go and open the door and sit in the back of those coat closets and cry.

Almost like I kind of had this precognition of grief that I was going to have in the future. When I would come home from school, he always wanted to talk about the war constantly and nobody else would listen to him. He started telling me these stories about things that he had seen in Vietnam before.

And sitting there and listening to him, you didn't know what to say. And especially being a nine-year-old, ten-year-old, quite often I felt trapped. One of these stories was horrible about how he was in combat and they were ambushed. And he remembered looking up, I don't know if a grenade or something was thrown at them, but seeing the feet and the arms of his friend in a tree.

He remembers certain soldiers that would take people's ears and wear them as necklaces and, you know, using different body parts of people that they had killed and wearing them as different pieces of clothing. I mean, it was just disturbing. But I think people just went insane.

He did talk a lot about how Vietnam was such a beautiful country and that to see these villages and things that they were going through, to see them be destroyed was just such a sin.

He actually ended up always adopting an animal in every village that he was in, and then he'd leave it for a family. But then he said on his way back into these villages, a lot of the times these families were gone, the dog was gone, and the village was gone. And it just, it ruined him.

When I would listen to my dad talk about his stories, I felt a sense of obligation to him to make his life mean something.

It made me feel very responsible for his story. It made me want to mother him in some ways and make sure he was okay. But also, I felt like if I wasn't this person or wasn't there for him, I would be betraying myself because I think I wanted somebody to listen to me. And how could I want that for myself if I wasn't there for somebody else?

I remember one time my dad, he was very picky about cleanliness as far as the details of things. And he always wanted the dust boards to be clean. And that was kind of my job, but I hated doing it. And one day he came home and I was supposed to have done it. He'd been using and I must have said something back to him like, oh, well, you're just high anyway or something. And he just launched into me.

I remember yelling for my mom, come and help me. And she just never came. And so I was able to get free and I ran down the hallway to the room she was at. And I said, mom, mom, you have to help me because he's not himself. He's not normal. It's different. And I remember she just looked at me just like completely vacant. And she just closed the door. At that point in time, I thought, okay, here I am.

And I got the beating of my life that day. After that, I was kind of more resolved to knowing that I was my own defender, my own savior. It was all up to me in this world. Nobody was going to help me or save me but me. I remember when my dad was getting worse and I still at the time didn't understand what was happening to him.

It was a very strange dynamic of feeling like I was afraid of him versus wanting to save him and being a 10-year-old and not knowing how. When he passed out, I used to go to his bed and sit there with a mirror holding it up to his nose, making sure that he was still alive.

That's not something I should have been doing, but there wasn't anybody there. Today's episode is brought to you by Quince. It's been a busy season of events and travel, and my wardrobe has taken a beating. A total overhaul isn't in my budget, but I'm replacing some of those worn-out pieces with affordable, high-quality essentials from Quince. By partnering with Top Factories, Quince cuts out the cost to the middleman and passes the savings on to us.

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This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,

and the next something goes wrong but with adt's 24 7 professional monitoring you still feel safe because when every second counts count on adt visit adt.com today towards high school we ended up finding this brittany spaniel and it was a puppy this dog steadied my dad

He's still used, but the dog took the edge off of my dad for many years. So I always had good grades. I always tried really hard because I didn't want to give my parents an additional reason to worry. So when I did go to college, I felt so free and I was so excited. And, you know, I started taking different classes and I just loved learning. I always loved it. My dad was very into politics and history.

It was during the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and my dad had a lot of things to say about the Gorbachev-Reagan era. Something about Russian, the language, really had an effect on me. I decided to take Russian and majored in college. In my area at the time there were a lot of refugees from the former Soviet Union that came over and so they would pair you up with families that needed to learn English.

One day I was waiting for the family that I was paired up with and an older woman came down the hallway and saw me sitting there. This woman said, "Do you want to come in and wait here?"

She gave me tea and we spoke in broken English and broken Russian. And 26 years later, she has become my adopted grandmother. And her family kind of took me in as a surrogate member of their family. It was they that told me, you know, you speak this language. Why don't you think about becoming a flight attendant?

In summer, I actually got an internship with Delta Airlines and I just loved it. I absolutely loved it. I loved the rush. I loved the excitement. And it was just exciting to me. After I graduated college, I got a job working at Delta Airlines and flew out of JFK to Moscow. I was able to go to England and see my family. I was able to fly back home and see my parents every once in a while.

I remember coming home one day and I came in the kitchen and all of the cupboards, all of them were open. The radio was blaring. Chairs were upside down. It almost looked like a weird art installation. And my dad was just manic. He scratched his skin a lot when he was high and he just kept repeating himself and he just had this nervous energy.

My mom came into the kitchen with all of this craziness going on. And I said, so dad's using again. And she's like, what? What are you talking about? And I'm like, are you kidding me? I always regret this, but I just looked at her and said, you're so weak. I'm not sure if she just didn't see it or she just couldn't cope. She just wasn't there. That's the only way I can describe it.

What had happened was the little dog that my dad had taken in ended up passing away that summer. And I think that that's why my dad started going downhill really quickly. I don't know how many times he was arrested that summer for public intoxication. And it was just, it was maddening. And yet when I would talk to my dad on the phone, I must have ended up getting him good days because I had no idea how bad things got.

I had a hard time with New York. I was just kind of down. I don't know. I just had this feeling I needed to get out of New York. And my dad called me one day and he was like, you know, I have this dream. Something bad happens to you. And he said, I think you need to put in for a different base. I just feel the same thing. I feel like I'm ready to move on to a different city.

So I put in for a transfer and in end of August 2001, I got a transfer to Boston and Boston actually fit me so much better

And during September of 2001, I got a phone call from my brother. And he said, have you looked at the news? And I said, no, why? And he said, there's a plane that hit the Twin Towers. And I'm like, oh, that's weird because I'm going to the airport now. He's like, I don't think you're working today. Turned on the news. And like the rest of the country and the rest of the world, we were just mesmerized and horrified.

Within probably two to three weeks, a lot of the airlines were announcing they were going to be downsizing or laying off people. And I had to think about what I wanted to do. I could take a five-year leave and come back. And so that's what I decided to do. During that fall, my dad had gone to England.

I think after 9-11, when there was talk about going into Afghanistan, it bothered him. And he left in October 2001. I would talk to him once or twice a week just to see how he was doing and everything sounded fine. And then after a little while, probably mid-October to November, I stopped hearing from him. And I'd say to my mom and my brother, like, have you guys spoken to dad?

No, actually, we haven't. And I thought, well, this is weird. It wasn't until first or second week of November, I got a call from one of my aunties. She said, we're having a little bit of a problem with your father. He's been missing for a few weeks now. And she said, and he went around to the pub with your cousin Nigel. And then after that, we haven't seen him.

And I was like, okay, well, first of all, him going missing is something that he would do, but not for, you know, three weeks and not being out of contact with people. So I left to go to England to look for my dad.

When I got to the airport, I was waiting for my cousins to get there and they were so glad to see me. And they said, you have no idea what's been going on. And I said, well, I bet I do because, you know, he has this problem. And they were still like, yeah, no, this is so much bigger than this.

Within that time frame, he started acting very strangely. And he started telling people that he was an undercover agent for the CIA that had been sent to the UK, that he had been sent to go to Afghanistan to help find bin Laden, that when he was in Afghanistan, he had

help to save a little girl that looked like my cousin that was captured by the Taliban. He was going back and forth to save these kids and to try to find bin Laden. He'd never had these delusions before. And they said, and we got a call from the police saying that they had a disturbance at a hotel.

So we went to this hotel and when I walked into the room, my dad was wearing nothing but a newspaper. He was just out of his mind, just crazy.

There were maps everywhere with writing and these different codes and tickets. And my dad just suddenly was like, oh, hi, hi, why are you here? And he's like, come sit here. Just very nervous and twitchy and just crazy. I made him sit down and I could tell he was trying to act normal, but clearly he couldn't.

Again, I felt myself just becoming very calm and was like, okay, I don't know what's going on here, dad, but this has to stop. I need to get you back home. We need to get you well. And he's like, well, no, no, I'm not going to go back home.

He just started talking about Afghanistan and how he couldn't leave because he was on this mission. And I just sat back and let him talk. And so I said, okay, well, we can work with that later. How about you get dressed and, you know, we'll wait for you and we'll go get you something to eat. So I left him in the room and it maybe been like five minutes or something. And then it was 10 minutes.

And I knocked and nobody answered. I kept knocking, knocking. So when I opened the door, the back door of the hotel room was open and there was a patio. It's completely fenced in by this concrete courtyard. And I thought, oh my God, he's escaped. He's jumped over this huge fence.

And to me, it was just shocking because while he was in Vietnam, he had jumped out of a helicopter and hurt his knees. And I thought, how on earth was he able to vault himself over this wall? But I think when you're on speed or whatever he's on, you're a god. You can do anything. I settled the bill with the hotel and we went back home to my aunt's house and continued our search for him.

It was probably my third day that I called a hotel in a nearby town. I could hear on the other end, they were kind of quiet. And they're like, well, he told us not to talk to you because he said you're part of Al Qaeda.

So we went to the second hotel and by the time we'd gotten there, he'd also gone. But when I went to his room, all of his furniture from the hotel room was in the hallway. Apparently he had thought that there were spy detecting devices on the furniture in the room. And I thought, oh my God, this is just beyond anything I'd seen before.

During this time, I felt a mixture of sadness that he'd been so affected by his own grief, knowing that we were going to be entering another war, something in that triggered his PTSD. And I felt just that it was such a helpless situation.

I was just at a loss. I didn't know how I could get him stable enough to get him back. I thought, even if I do get him, how am I going to get him on a plane to go back during 9-11, especially? I think because I hadn't been sleeping and I hadn't been eating, I kind of just felt like I was living in this unreal bubble.

My whole life, most of my feelings were centered around how he was feeling. It's always been hard for me to kind of regulate how I feel based off of any given situation.

The whole time, I think he thought of me not as his daughter. I think his brain had shifted into thinking I was working for the enemy. So basically after that, the police and their social services took on the bulk of what I was doing. And it was amazing just to see how society can function when its police and its social workers work together. I was just so impressed.

Within a day, actually, I got another call and it was from a social worker. And they said, we managed to find your father and we managed to get your dad into hospital. And I was just so overjoyed. I just felt like this huge weight had been lifted off of me.

So my cousin and I went to the last hotel to pick up his things. And when I went up to the room and opened the door, he had taken apart the wall in the bathroom and part of the pipes. The sheetrock was all on the floor. The lampshades were off. The lamp was in parts. The stuffing was taken out of the bed. The mirror was broken.

I said to the hotel owners, I am so sorry. I don't know how I can pay you for all of the damage. And they said the same thing, that he's a veteran. You know, we understand this happens. And he said, don't worry about it.

The same response we had was just so kind. And I just think about how different things could have been if we had been given this type of kindness back in the U.S. I felt the support that I had been missing my whole life. It was so healing. I knew that I had to go back because it was getting to be towards the new year and I was running out of money.

So as I was getting ready to go, though, I got a call and they said, we hate to tell you this, but your father's gone missing. I was like, what are you talking about? And they said, yeah, he's gone. We don't know where he went. They did find him within a day or two. And they thought by institutionalizing him, at least there would be people there watching him to make sure he got straight before he would leave.

And as I was getting ready to go for the second time, I got another call saying he had escaped D block. How? I don't know. I've never found out, but I wasn't going to stay any longer. I was so frustrated. I was sad for him, but I was also so irritated. I just thought the whole universe just keeps working against me.

So I went back home and I just kind of laid low, just kind of processing what I'd just been through. I didn't see my dad again until March or April of that year.

Eventually, within a month, my dad returned home. I never found out how he returned home. It's always been this kind of mystery. And it was very weird seeing him for the first time. He knew what had happened. And he was almost bashful around me. I think he was embarrassed. I don't think he remembered most of it.

I did get a letter from my dad that summer, and he had apologized for everything that happened there. And he said that he was so fortunate to have a daughter that would be willing to go and help him. And I could tell he felt bad about it. But that was my dad. One moment he could be just wonderful. And then, you know, after using, he could just be the devil himself.

When I returned from England, it was already December of 2001, and I was 27. I knew it was time to get another job because I'd just been living off of the money I had gotten from my furlough from Delta. The first job I found was getting a job translating for Social Security Administration.

That job actually ended up being a job taking survivor claims for the families of the survivors of 9-11, which was depressing work. But at the same time, it kind of made me feel like I had a sense of value or I was helping people.

I think I started acting out in the only way that I think was normal for people in their mid-20s. Going out drinking and hanging out with people that I normally wouldn't have. And, you know, nothing really bad, but I was just kind of living a different life. I think I was just fed up with trying to do things the right way all of the time. One night, it was May 15th, 2004.

I had ended up going out with a bunch of people that I at the time called friends. We ended up at a club and long story short, at the end of the night, I don't know how it happened, but we separated and I was there looking for them and I didn't have a way back and I ran into a friend of a friend of a friend.

Ended up at some party with them. And I knew in the back of my mind that I shouldn't be there. I shouldn't have gone to this party. And if there's any lesson to be learned from this, always listen to your inner voice. And that night, I ignored it. And that was the night that one life ended and another life began for me. I was raped for an hour and 48 minutes that night.

I remember every minute. I remember looking at the walls, looking at the clock, looking at the window frames and memorizing everything. But I also remember giving up halfway through

And remembering something somebody once said about when you're drowning, how dying is so much easier when you cease to struggle, when you just give up. It's a much more peaceful death. And it's kind of how I approached the rape. I thought, you know, there's not a lot I can do. I'm just going to give up and I'm just going to let it go. It was 2.13 in the morning. And I think that that is the moment when I died.

But saying that, at that moment, I think in a strange sense, I was also kind of born again. I remembered what I needed to do next. I had this odd sort of peace come about me. You need to take something and leave something and leave. And I grabbed a sock that was his, and I left hair of my own. I knew to leave DNA behind.

I remember going down the staircase and I wasn't afraid. I was just angry. And it was this anger that I'd never felt before. And just making this vow that I would never be treated this way again by anybody. And it was this new feeling that I'd never had in my life for myself before.

That night, I didn't have anything with me, my shoes. I was walking down the street bleeding. None of the cabs would pick me up. I had to walk two miles home without my shoes on. And I knew that I was that was it. It was just me. And there was no one else. It was just me.

The next day, I went to the hospital. I knew not to take a shower. They did a rape kit, and from there, the police were called, and this person that had raped me had also done this to two other women. I had to make the decision whether or not I wanted to prosecute.

And after having gone through the experience with the police, they have to be so prosecutorial in everything, every question they ask you that for me and everything I'd been through, it was way too much. But I was part of the witness to a defense for one of the other girls that this has happened to.

A year after the event happening with my father in England, I just started to feel kind of low. It developed into me isolating myself from friends and just kind of keeping to myself. And at one point in time, I just couldn't function anymore.

For three days, I remember just sitting in bed and watching the shadows move across the wall. I just wanted the world to stop spinning and I wanted to get off. Because so much of my life when I'd seen things happening, I'd been told that it wasn't true, it wasn't really happening. I think my brain kind of formed to think that reality was not real.

I had a problem with really wondering if these things had happened at all. I started feeling this kind of weird sensation that I was walking through a fog. It was like I was living in a dream. And I was diagnosed with, well, complex PTSD, but also a derealization disorder.

The easiest way I can describe it is, say, if you move or if you spend the night in a hotel and you wake up the next morning and you're kind of disoriented. You feel that when you feel this derealization. You feel this kind of feeling of you know where you're at. You know you're yourself. But everything kind of looks a little bit different.

And it tends to happen in the most normal situations. I could be sitting at work or, you know, out with friends and all of a sudden I'll just feel this kind of creepy, subtle shift in the atmosphere. And I know where I'm at, but you can't tell if you are awake or if you're really dreaming. Basically, you're constantly questioning your reality.

And it's very hard to hold on to a sense of stability when you're in this phase. Sometimes it's lasted like three months and there's nothing that cures it. But once I knew it had something to do with, you know, my brain chemistry making the shift, it made me feel a little better and that it was something I couldn't help.

I think a lot of my life since then has been centered, unfortunately, around trying to avoid events that trigger this. And so it's kept me from being involved in a lot of things or taking risks because I'm always worried that the other shoe is going to drop and all of a sudden my whole universe is going to shift a little bit. And the feeling is just so miserable of being lost in reality.

I think the reason why it's so horrific for me is that it means that nowhere and no one is safe. Because I could feel this at any time. I can feel it sitting in my home and there's nothing I can do to make it go away. The easiest thing for me to do is divert my attention away.

And once I remember that I won't always feel this way, I feel a little bit more hopeful. I know that it'll always come back, but I know that it will always go away. And I think that helps a lot. This season, Instacart has your back-to-school. As in, they've got your back-to-school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back-to-school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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Five years after what had happened in England, my dad had been using and I think it had just been getting worse and worse for him. It was pretty amazing. My dad was able to have this drug addiction and yet he was very much involved in workers' rights and was very much involved in his union when he was still working. He created a scholarship program

for kids in high school. He had friends that really cared about him. He was very sociable. Everybody knew him. And it's odd to have that kind of dynamic. He finally fessed up to his problem and went to his doctor. His doctor friend prescribed him Suboxone, which I know they give opioid addicts to help with their addiction.

In January of 2007, I was at work one day and my brother randomly showed up. My brother said, just leave your things and I'll take you home. As we were driving home, I said, have you spoken to dad? I haven't spoken to him in a couple of days. And he turned around to me and he said, dad's dead.

I said, "What? What are you saying?" Like, I just talked to him like two days ago. He said, "He's dead. He just died."

You know, I remember talking to him before he died and just telling him, like, you've got to grow up. You've got to stop this, like taking these medications just whenever because it's making you worse. You're too old. You're in your late 50s. You've got to stop doing this. And he was like, yeah, you know, you're right. It's so sad because he was admitting it finally, you know, after so many years that he had a problem.

Apparently, that doctor that gave him Suboxone, this doctor had given my dad the whole thing. So he gave him 90 tablets. So my dad overdosed by taking medication that he thought would save him. My brother found him. He had gone to sleep and he didn't wake up.

Once it dawned on me, I remember crying and screaming. And I remember saying, ow, like I physically felt the pain. I was nauseous. I can't explain it. It was just a very physical reaction to his death. There's a certain animalistic part to grieving. This grief takes over you.

It reminded me of when I was little and would go into the coat closet in elementary school and sit in there and cry. And it was the same feeling, this kind of hollow sadness.

And I also think a part of me felt misplaced because much of my life was made around trying to save him. And I think once he died, I felt like a failure. I just felt like so much work and so much of my time had gone into this project and this person that wasn't going to make it anyway.

The most challenging aspect about having lived a life for somebody else is not knowing what to do with it after they've gone. He'd been like a tornado in life, just wrecking everything in its way and just so big and messy. And when he left, you just felt this void inside.

Since my dad has died, my feelings of derealization actually have gotten worse. I think because he's not here, that space is empty. My brain has been filling this empty space with questions about whether or not things really happened, whether it was as bad as it was, or maybe my dad really didn't go to Vietnam, and maybe he didn't have this episode in England.

After my dad died, it felt like all of this kind of noise and hum of life just stopped and I could hear things that normally I couldn't hear before. And there's a big question mark in my life as far as the career or what I would have done with my life had I not spent it on trying to save somebody that couldn't be saved.

I just always wonder what I could have done with myself. And I think that about my dad, too. You know what? He could have done amazing things in this world. And I think I still can. I just have such a mental block about what I'm meant to do. Because my first profession, really, as a child, was to be a bodyguard, a nurse, a kid that was trying to do the impossible.

I have so much compassion for people that struggle with mental health issues. And I understand sometimes why people don't make it because it is such an overwhelming feeling. And you never know what war somebody is going through when you see them on the street. I think about what's going on with Ukraine right now. And I think if my dad were alive, he would have been really affected by what's happening and the images that we're seeing.

Seeing the children that have been bombed and to have to see citizens go through combat that normally it's reserved for soldiers, trained soldiers. It's just horrific. And actually, my Russian family that I was speaking about earlier, the daughter, she managed to get her friend out of Kiev, her daughter and her son. She got them out last week. They went from Kiev to Warsaw.

And her son is 14 years old. Her friend said that he has already been experiencing feelings of PTSD. He keeps hearing bombs when he was in Poland. Luckily, they're in the United States now and they're safe. Unfortunately, her father's still there. But I just keep thinking about her son and how he's going to be affected by this, even though they made it out okay.

And it just, this echo of these wars for no reason, it just rings through generations later.

And I think back to when it started for my family and my granddad having liberated a concentration camp, how that violence and how that horror created in him a different person than who he was meant to be, I think, and how that impacted his relationship with my dad.

The same thing happened to him where he grew up and he was in Vietnam and he became an alcoholic and a drug addict. And I grew up with this experience. And now, you know, I'm seeing what's going on in Ukraine. And it's just this forever echoes of patterns that keep happening.

At the end of the day, I think I've learned from this that I can't fight my dad's war for him. My dad's Vietnam was his own story. And I'm much more than an echo of his war. I have my own war to deal with. And it's kind of, you know, to use an airline idea, you have to be able to put on your mask first before you can put on somebody else's.

I began to value myself not through being able to think of myself as this loyal daughter that was worth it enough to save her father, but as this loyal person to myself. It was just this strange concept that I'd never thought of before. I suspended my own feelings about myself or how things affected me, I think, until almost 30, at which point I began to feel a lot of rage and anger.

I'd never been angry before like this. And I think if I hadn't kind of harnessed that anger that night, I wouldn't have been able to have it in me or the motivation to survive. I discovered that this person had always existed within myself. This person that had the ability to save herself. I'm the last person that I would think that could save myself, but everybody has that same person inside themselves.

My father had his own person that could have saved himself. That wasn't my job. Everybody has the ability within themselves to be their own hero and to save themselves. And I don't think I would have known that unless I went through this. But I don't think I'm unique. I think that everybody can do this.

If you're able to tap into that part of yourself that is strongest and realize that that's the only thing that's truly going to be there for you in this world, I think you'll be a lot better off. And I think it makes it a lot easier to be kinder to other people once you're that much kinder to yourself.

Today's guest requested to remain anonymous, but if you'd like to contact her, you can email at [email protected]. That's K-B-O-J-A-N-G-L-E-S [email protected]. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

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