A short and unpopular opinion, because someone needs to say it to the men who have been told they are broken in every available direction.
Not everything wrong with you is a wound. The therapy culture has gotten so good at finding pathology that it has started diagnosing love.
Your impatience with small talk after you have watched men die is not a symptom. It is a correct sense of scale. Your inability to care about office politics is not avoidance. It is clarity about what a day is worth, bought at a price most people never pay. Your fury when someone wastes the time of people you are responsible for is not anger management failure. It is the residue of having been responsible for whether people lived.
Some of it is not a problem. It is the shape love takes when it has nowhere to go.
Some of what your family calls your temper is grief that has never been given a name or a place to land. Some of your distance is a guard you posted over people you were terrified of losing again. These are not malfunctions to be medicated out of you. They are love, deformed by the conditions it was forced to survive in. The work is not to delete them. It is to give the love somewhere to go that is not a clenched jaw at the dinner table.
Be honest about the part that is genuinely costing the people you love. Do not use any of this as a license to stay armored and call it integrity. But stop letting anyone convince you that everything intense in you is damage. Some of it is the most alive thing about you, pointed the wrong way.
Heal what is actually a wound. The rest of it, the fierce and inconvenient rest of it, does not need healing. It needs aim.
— Return Path