If I explained to you everything I’ve lived through in the last six — almost seven — years, you’d probably wonder how I’m still standing at all. Hell, you might wonder why I’m still fully lucid and not somewhere downtown licking concrete walls and speaking in riddles to pigeons.
Truth is, I’ve survived because I’ve lived my entire life in a state of permanent tactical readiness.
Garrison Duty.
That’s what I call it.
Always on watch. Always waiting for impact. Always expecting something to breach the gate eventually. My nervous system has never really understood peace. Even during good moments, there’s always a part of me listening for boots in the hallway.
People think hypervigilance is paranoia until the hypervigilant person ends up being right.
Funny how that works.
Life has never been easy for me — not internally anyway. Even when things looked “fine” from the outside, my internal world was a battlefield. I learned young that if shit could go wrong, eventually it probably would. So I adapted.
You adapt or you die.
That adaptation turned me into someone incredibly difficult to break.
I became observant. Defensive. Emotionally armed at all times. The kind of person who can feel the energy shift in a room before anybody says a word. The kind of person whose ears perk up over tiny tonal changes in someone’s voice because somewhere deep in my nervous system, danger has always been my default setting.
Permanent tactical readiness means your body never truly leaves the battlefield.
And honestly? That state of being probably saved my life during what I can only describe as a full-blown spiritual attack.
Now before somebody reading this rolls their eyes and starts mentally diagnosing me from behind their iPhone screen, let me clarify something:
I know exactly how insane this sounds.
Trust me.
I lived it.
During that time, it felt like my third eye had been ripped open with a crowbar. Everything became spiritually loud. Violent. Disturbing. I started seeing the absolute worst parts of humanity all at once — sex, corruption, manipulation, hatred, voyeurism, cruelty, rape, murder. It felt like somebody plugged my consciousness directly into humanity’s septic tank.
It was psychological warfare.
And honestly? A complete fucking mindfuck.
Some of it felt spiritual. Some of it felt psychological. Most of it felt impossible to explain without sounding detached from reality. But when you’re the one experiencing it, the fear is real regardless of what label people attach to it later.
I remember sitting there thinking:
“Oh my God. Ryan Murphy would have a field day with this.”
It genuinely felt like American Horror Story: Spiritual Attack Edition.
Too bad Angela Bassett never showed up in the visions because honestly? I could’ve used her.
Humor became survival for me. If I didn’t laugh occasionally, I think the terror would’ve swallowed me whole.
And underneath all that terror was this crushing feeling that everybody secretly hated me.
Every silence felt loaded.
Every interaction felt fake.
Every glance felt dangerous.
It was like my nervous system had turned into a war siren that wouldn’t shut the fuck up.
But strangely enough — in the middle of all that darkness — there were also moments of grace.
Quiet moments.
Moments where I felt protected.
Loved.
Watched over.
And that’s the part people don’t understand when they talk about faith like it’s just some decorative personality trait. For people living on permanent Garrison Duty, God stops being symbolic.
God becomes structural support.
Necessary support.
Because when your own mind starts becoming hostile territory, you need something stronger than yourself to anchor to.
So I returned to the prayers I learned as a little girl.
And honestly, there’s something tragically funny about that because childhood-me used to get irritated hearing people refer to God as “Father.”
“No,” I’d think. “Jim is my father.”
And now here I am years later realizing I finally understand what they meant.
During that period, my husband and my children became my safe place. Their consistency brought me back to earth when I thought I might disappear into the psychological fog permanently. They grounded me without even realizing it.
And maybe the hardest lesson in all of this was discovering who wasn’t there for me.
That experience changed something fundamental in me.
It taught me that the family I created matters more than the family I came from.
And yes — I even tried therapy.
I sat there hoping someone would finally explain what the hell was happening to me.
But eventually I realized something terrifying and liberating all at once:
Nobody was coming to save me.
Not the therapist.
Not society.
Not people pretending to understand things they’ve never experienced.
At the end of all of it, I learned that I could count on myself and God.
That’s it.
Me and God.
And weirdly enough, that realization gave me peace.
Not soft peace.
Not naïve peace.
Earned peace.
The kind forged in psychological warfare.
I still live on Garrison Duty in many ways. My nervous system still scans for danger before comfort. I still struggle to fully relax. I still feel spiritually aware in ways that are difficult to articulate without people misunderstanding me.
But I survived.
And more importantly?
I survived without losing my ability to love.
That feels important.
Wishing you well from Garrison Duty.
xoxo,
Kel
