I thought I’d left my wars behind.
Eight years in the Marine Corps, nearly a year in Afghanistan, and then it was over. No ceremony, no chaos. Just the sudden, loud quiet of ordinary life.
And then my body declared mutiny.
But there was no dramatic warning, no slow-motion-worthy collapse. Just a systems failure. Fatigue that felt industrial grade. Joints that ached like they’d been lined with glass. Muscles that called in sick. Words I once commanded started ghosting me mid-thought.
Then came the doctors, gathered like a panel of confused judges. Autoimmune, neurological, hepatological—everyone with a microphone, and no one with a plan.
My medical record started to read like a dysfunctional group chat: rheumatoid arthritis, white matter disease of the brain, benign spinal tumor, primary biliary cholangitis, heart valve disease, and more. A burn pit party nobody wanted to RSVP to, but everyone showed up anyway.
My body was supposed to be a trusted agent. Instead, it became an unreliable narrator.
So I treated it like any other problem: observe, diagnose, fix. But the harder I tried to manage it, the more it managed me. Swollen joints? Ice and Tylenol. Brain fog? Caffeine and toxic positivity. GI chaos? Bland food and denial.
I logged, tracked, and adjusted, my data supposedly proving that work meant control. Proof is my love language.
I built spreadsheets for flare days, color-coded for meds, mobility, and moods. I tracked my pain. I made illness my full-time job.
That kind of living seeps into everything. The small humiliations that don’t make it into medical charts. Sitting beside my husband while he ate, asking to smell his mouth just to remember what flavors used to taste like. Moving the wrong way while getting out of bed and ending up sobbing on the floor, enraged that one wrong motion could keep me out of the gym for weeks.
I wasn’t a crier. Back then, holding it in felt like strength. Now I cry often, sometimes quietly, in the bathroom, because I still don’t know how to be seen when it hurts.
I’m in Charge
My entire time in the Marines, I had to establish credibility in every room I walked into, no matter how many times I’d already been there. I knew the best way to do that was to learn the systems inside and out, know every Marine Corps order like it was my personal bible: Learn the rules, learn how everyone worked, figure out how to work with them.
It’s one of the many ways I was able to lead without rank: quietly, consistently, until doubt had nowhere left to stand. Years later, when my body turned skeptic, I recognized the pattern. I didn’t need to overpower it; I needed to study it. Learn its system, its workarounds, its limits. I needed to understand how it functioned on bad days and how to negotiate with it on worse days.
It’s a kind of madness to measure nearly every moment for risk. You start speaking in contingencies: if I eat this, if I walk there, if I sleep wrong. Sometimes, I mistake momentum for recovery. Other times I am, as the kids say, delulu.
Life between flare-ups is small. The world moves, and I’m cataloguing. The discipline that once made me strong now keeps me functional. Somewhere in all this maintenance, grief slips in—the meals I can’t share, the body I can’t trust, and the version of me that didn’t have to think about any of this.
When I tried to run again, my body said no. When I tried to rest, it said no. When I tried to just exist without pain…you guessed it: Nope.
And that’s when I decided we were fighting.
Because I don’t do “no.”
Not from systems and sure as hell not from connective tissue.
So I replied: You don’t tell me when we quit. I decide when we quit.
It became a quiet mantra, repeated between heat packs and ugly tears. Eventually, it stopped being a challenge and became a promise to myself.
That line, “I decide when we quit,” didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from practice. From repetition. From years of being quietly dismissed and quietly proving otherwise.
My immune system attacks the synovial fluid between every joint, causing systemic inflammation throughout my body. The white matter disease adds balance and coordination issues. Primary biliary cholangitis makes it hard to eat and digest. Everything comes with crazy fatigue.
Some mornings I wake up feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck. I still train. Pain is my constant, but not my authority. For me, every rep is resistance. Every step an FU to biology.
Sitting still because I was being made to sit still? Absolutely the fuck not.
So I signed up for pain I could control. I ran a HYROX race; look it up if you want to laugh. I did it before I even knew my liver had stopped knowing how to be a liver. I’m training for a mini-Ironman now, despite the Corps’ very generous definition of “swimming proficiency.” I figure if pain is inevitable, I might as well schedule it.
Then came the exoskeleton. Not a miracle. A negotiation.
I met a man who treats human motion like sacred architecture. He didn’t look at me with pity. He looked at me the way a combat engineer eyes a bridge that needs a little something: What’s still load bearing? What can be rebuilt? He was curious and tactical.
So when he asked if I’d be open to a fit test for an ankle exoskeleton from Dephy, I said hell yes. Not because I thought it would save me, but because I believe in tools. The Marines taught me how to use whatever’s in reach, aka weapons of opportunity. Because adaptation isn’t surrender; it’s strategy.
The first time I strapped in, I half-expected Iron Man. And it delivered—enough to make my inner Marvel kid squeal a bit. But the exo didn’t take over; it listened, absorbed impact, and carried part of the load for me. For the first time in years, it felt like my body and I were more aligned.
It didn’t erase the pain. But it gave me hours where pain stopped shouting. Where I remembered what ease felt like. And yes—gains. Because what’s the point if I can’t flex a little? Sun’s out, guns out. Even if my joints sound like popcorn.
I still keep the spreadsheets, but they are no longer an obsession. I still curse my body and thank it in the same breath. Gratitude and fury have learned to share room in me.
This isn’t a comeback story. It’s maintenance: survival with dark humor, compression socks, and motivation from world-class athletes.
When my body refuses, when my mind spirals, when discipline packs up and leaves, I watch them. Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Tara Davis-Woodhall, Sha’Carri Richardson. They are sermons in motion, and I watch them the way some people pray. I’ve Googled their warmups, their recovery routines, their offseason drills. I’ve stitched their methods into my own training to show my body a new way forward. Or remember something it used to know.
These athletes remind me what fierce, unapologetic motion looks like—even if I can’t replicate it. They offer me motion cues when my body forgets.
So I keep moving.
Even when it hurts. Even when crying feels easier. Even when everything in me is begging to stop.
Because you don’t tell me when we quit.
I decide when we quit.
This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mollie Turnbull. Kim Vo wrote the headlines.
