Redefining the Man in the Mirror

 

Redefining the Man in the Mirror

I spent most of my adult life in environments most people would cross the street to avoid. The Army first, then private military contracting, then close protection. War zones. High risk operations. Situations where the wrong decision carried permanent consequences.

I was fit, strong and trained to operate under pressure. My confidence was not bravado. It was earned, tested repeatedly in places that stripped away pretence very quickly.

What I discovered after being medically discharged with PTSD was that civilian life was harder for me than any operational theatre. The ordinary rhythms of day to day existence unsettled me in ways combat never had. High risk environments made sense. Instinct had value there. The version of myself I understood was still useful.

Then my body began to fail.

Fibromyalgia came first. Doctors linked it to PTSD. I carried on as trained, pushing through, minimising symptoms, treating pain as background noise.

Until October 2023, when I collapsed at home and left in an ambulance.

The following eleven months dismantled everything I thought I understood about myself.

Stroke was ruled out. A brain aneurysm was discovered but deemed stable. I was diagnosed with Functional Neurological Disorder, a condition where the nervous system malfunctions not because of structural damage but because signalling between brain and body breaks down. Again, it was linked to PTSD. It seemed my body had been keeping account long after I had chosen not to.

Because the aneurysm was assessed as stable, I was transferred to a neurological rehabilitation centre to focus on FND.

On 3 April 2024, the aneurysm ruptured.

I was rushed to hospital and transferred to Addenbrooke’s. My wife was told that survival of the transfer was uncertain. Survival of surgery was unlikely.

I spent four weeks unconscious in intensive care.

When I regained consciousness, fourteen years of memory were gone. I could not walk. I had significant hearing loss. I was blind in my left eye.

After further weeks in hospital and rehabilitation, I was discharged in September 2024. Eleven months after the first collapse.

I had survived something that should have killed me. What awaited me at home was something I was not prepared for.

I returned to a house I did not recognise.

To a wife I had no memory of marrying.

To three children I could not remember being born.

I have known fear in my life. Real fear, the kind that sharpens thought and triggers training. In those environments fear had purpose. It steadied me because I trusted my preparation and my capability.

This was different.

For the first time, I felt genuinely vulnerable. Not operationally exposed, but fundamentally unsure. I could not trust my memory. I could not rely on my body. There was no training doctrine for this. No procedure to fall back on.

I had been a man built for extreme environments. Now I was sitting in a home I did not remember, facing a family I loved without recollection, with nothing familiar to anchor me.

That loss of identity cut deeper than the physical damage.

Masculinity had never been theoretical to me. It had been expressed through function. Through responsibility. Through capability. Provider. Protector. The steady presence others relied upon.

I had never needed to analyse it because it had never been stripped away.

Now it was.

At the same time, the wider culture seemed locked in an argument about what masculinity even meant. Strength and discipline were increasingly framed as suspect. Self reliance was portrayed as emotional deficiency. Military values were often reduced to caricature.

I found that difficult to accept.

Not because I was resistant to introspection, but because those values had preserved my life more than once. They had enabled me to provide for a family I was now trying to remember. The men who shaped me, my father, my grandfather, the soldiers I served beside, were not destructive men. They were principled, disciplined and dependable.

The problem, I concluded slowly, was not masculinity itself. It was a distortion of it. A confusion of strength with aggression and of stoicism with emotional absence.

I was not willing to discard the foundations that had carried me through war and now through survival.

So I returned to fundamentals.

Loyalty. Discipline. Showing up. Doing the difficult thing because it requires doing. Being reliable.

Those principles did not vanish when I lost memory or mobility. They simply had to be applied differently.

Rehabilitation required discipline. Rebuilding identity required honesty. Accepting help required humility.

That last one was new territory.

The process is ongoing. Some days are controlled and productive. Others are heavy with what has been lost. I will not pretend otherwise.

But there is structure returning.

And much of that structure rests on my wife.

I have no memory of our wedding. In many ways I am relearning the life we built. That reality is painful at times, for both of us.

Yet her steadiness has been the constant. She stayed. She continues to stay. What I am rebuilding is not being built in isolation.

There was a time when admitting dependence would have felt like failure. It does not now. It feels accurate.

I am not the man I was before April 2024. That man exists in photographs and in stories told to me. Parts of him are permanently inaccessible.

What remains is a man who survived catastrophic neurological injury and chose to engage with the life in front of him rather than retreat from it.

The values I was raised with did not collapse under pressure. They adapted.

Discipline now means attending therapy and enduring frustration. Strength now includes vulnerability. Loyalty means committing to a family I am still rediscovering.

Masculinity was never eradicated. It was refined.

It was not the problem. It became the framework through which I rebuilt.

It took losing almost everything to understand that.

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