You know, sometimes you just find yourself staring at the ceiling, the glow of the phone a small comfort in the vast darkness, and you remember a time when you were… different. You remember the discipline, the unwavering resolve, the certainty that came with a clear chain of command, even if that command led to horrors no civilian could ever truly comprehend. And then you try to explain that to a young woman in Lululemon who’s worried about her “chi.” It’s… something. This week, for instance. A tiny twinge. A fleeting sensation, hardly more than a tickle, deep in the abdominal cavity. To her, it was an immediate catastrophic failure. Her pancreas, she was convinced. Or her liver, perhaps. A complete systemic collapse, after years of… yoga, I suppose. It was fascinating, watching her descend into that particular spiral of self-diagnosis. Cancelled all her classes, naturally. DEMANDED multiple scans. As if a diagnostic imaging department exists solely for the sudden anxiety of a minor digestive cramp. I saw that same fear in the eyes of new recruits, before the drill sergeants hammered out the neuroticism. But theirs was a fear of *actual* dismemberment. This was… a fear of an imagined failing, a betrayal from within, not from without. A very civilian malady, that. It reminds you of the quiet desperation you used to feel, lying awake after a particularly… vivid… night. The physical aches were one thing, easily identified, easily medicated. It was the internal tremors, the ones that had no outward manifestation, that truly unsettled you. The ones that felt like rot, spreading invisibly. You’d try to explain it to someone, once, a doctor perhaps, and they’d nod with that vacant, placating expression. “It’s stress,” they’d say. As if stress could account for the profound, systemic shift that occurred when you witnessed the absolute fragility of human existence, repeatedly. And then you see this young woman, utterly convinced her internal organs have staged a revolt over a bit of indigestion, and you just… sigh. Some battles, it seems, are fought in the mind, regardless of the terrain. And some anxieties are simply too small for the weight of your own recollections.