Not entirely alone

Tonight was our department's honors banquet. Spoiler alert, all the awards went to people other than me. So it's not a post about that. It's a post about those bags that have those camouflage handbags so many milspouses wear and so many others bitch about.
They're AMAZING! Like, seriously. I AM IN LOVE.
I don't want one. It's not that kind of thing.
It's what they represent.

One of the hardest things about being here and doing this is being so very much alone in the world. Oh, I am sure there are/were other milspouses at BIGU. We are sandwiched between several bases here. But you never SEE them. We're incognito.
Sometimes I wish that weren't the case. Sometimes I wish there was at least one other person who gets how being stateside doesn't mean my relationship is peaches and cream, that I don't worry, that there is never danger, etc.
There have been so many days when I have wanted nothing more than to have a cup of coffee with someone who gets it.
It's not that I don't have lovely, wonderful milspouse friends. I do. I am incredibly blessed in that department. They're just not here. There is no shoulder to cry on when I need it. Civilians give me far too many, you're so lucky... blah, blah. Worse still, far to many do the gasp, omg when I explain it's been nearly 6 mos. Thanks, I didn't need a reminder that I am alone today. Or my personal favorite, people doing the academic brain dump about what they know about PTSD, or Wounded Warriors, etc...like you don't know what the research says, or worse that you would want to chat about these things in detail. It feels sometimes like people want to be authorities on your life and your friends lives without them having any understanding of how any of it feels...but they are going to tell you how it feels anyway.
I think out of all the things I have faced in graduate school, the persistent feeling of being a stranger in a strange land is the worst.
I try to bury it, to push it away, and pretend it's not there. In the end, this negatively impacts my relationship with Senior Jefe.

So I went through the proverbial rounds of this today at the banquet. I think the worst was people sitting there telling me about "Morality PTSD", which sounds pretty fucking similar to survivor's guilt, like I wouldn't know anything about it. In all fairness, I am not sure the woman caught that I was a milspouse. I don't bring it up in conversation.  But then everyone at the table turned and stared at me while she spoke, looking for something... an AH HA moment, a moment of realization, or a confirmation, maybe a breakdown. I honestly don't know what they were looking for, so I sat there and stared straight back. By the dessert, I wanted to run for the hills.

And then it happened...
almost like a miracle...
I saw it.
A camoflauge bag with a name tag, rank, and flag...
It was a milspouse.
At our honor's banquet.

OMFG!
I nearly fell out of my chair.

So, I talked myself down enough to not go over there and gush...I mean how many milspouses are geologists? Surely this was an error, or I imagined it or something.

I went over and introduced myself and she's legit. Her husband is in the Army at Ft. Bragg, meaning she is doing this fucked up long-distance thing just like me. She's an undergrad in geoscience education.

OMFG... did I mention this is better than Christmas?

I am not entirely alone in the world, in this situation, in this life of limbo.

Maybe it's better than Christmas...more like Chanukah. I mean seriously what are the odds that  I would meet someone anywhere close to being like me at BIGU?

Anyway, I just had to share.