I was in my early twenties, working on the gun system on a CF-18 out of Cold Lake, Alberta.
The first thing almost everyone said back to me was: the fighter jet has a gun system?
That's where this starts. It's an honourable job. It's a genuinely cool job. Not many people can say they've worked on a fighter jet, let alone stood close enough to hear one start up: the rumble, the feeling of it in your chest, the part where you can't quite believe this is real and it's your Tuesday. And then you go home to your parents, your siblings, your spouse, and you tell them what you do, and what you get back is a blank face.
They don't know what it means. And somewhere in the back of your head there's a briefing reminding you that you can't break down the particulars anyway, because the particulars are classified.
So how do you explain it? Do you even bother?
Like a mechanic for planes
That's what I landed on. I'm sort of like a mechanic, but for planes.
It isn't really true. But people know what a mechanic does, and it gets the point across, and the conversation can move on to something everybody at the table can actually participate in. So you use it. It works.
What I didn't clock at the time is that it costs you something every time you use it. You just qualified on systems that a vanishingly small number of people will ever touch, and you've traded that down into something ordinary because ordinary is what fits in the room. It's an approximation you chose on purpose, and it quietly cheapens the thing you actually did.
Do that once and it's nothing. Do it for ten years and your family knows a slightly fictional, simplified version of your working life. Not because you were hiding anything. Because full fidelity cost more than it returned, and you made that trade a thousand times without ever once deciding to.
The outsider is inside
There's a script, and if you served you already know it.
"I'm in the military."
"Oh, are you infantry?"
"No, I'm in the Air Force."
"Oh, so are you a pilot then?"
On its face that's a perfectly reasonable question. Inside, it lands somewhere closer to an insult, and it takes a while to work out why.
The military has a culture that holds Non-Commissioned Members (NCMs) up as the backbone of the institution. The implication is that you earned your place and you hold the system up with your service. That's not a shot at the officers flying the aircraft; they're accomplished under their own benchmarks. It's that to an outsider, you're not in the best role. There's a ladder in their head and you're not on the top rung of it.
And the outsider is inside. It's your family. They don't distinguish between the NCM corps and the Officer corps; to them, military is military. Or, more often, "army," which is its own separate wound. It probably doesn't help that Army and Air Force both wear green. The Navy is the odd one out, and anecdotally they get mistaken for civilian jobs entirely.
The first time this happens it's funny. You wave it off. I was a civilian myself not that long ago, I'd have asked the same thing.
Then it's two years later. You're not seeing extended family the way you used to. You go home for the holidays and someone asks what you do again, and you explain it again, thinking this time it'll stick, and what you get is a polite acknowledgement of something they clearly don't understand.
If you're fortunate, your spouse is beside you and she catches the look on your face. She still doesn't fully understand the job. But she knows what it costs to sit there and not be understood, and she's watching you absorb it. That's worth an enormous amount and it's also load-bearing, because she's usually the only one carrying that with you.
It compounds, and it isn't only yours
Most of the time she's moved across the country for your career. Not once: repeatedly, over a career, provinces at a time. Sometimes she's set her own ambitions down to do it, with very little institutional support for hers compared to yours.
You know intellectually that nobody did anything wrong here; you both agreed to this. It doesn't shake the sense that you owe her a good life to make up for the moving.
And then watch what she does when you land somewhere new.
She arrives in a town she didn't choose, knowing nobody, and she goes and builds it from nothing. Finds work in whatever the local market happens to be, which usually means explaining a résumé full of short stints and gaps that were never her fault, and sometimes means taking something well below what she's qualified for because it's what's available within driving distance of the base. Finds the gym, the playgroup, the church, the volunteer thing. Works out which neighbours are worth knowing. Finds the two or three people she can actually call when something goes wrong. That is not a small piece of work and it doesn't happen quickly. It takes the better part of the first year, sometimes longer, and a lot of it happens while you're away on course or on exercise and she's doing it alone.
Then it's good. For two years, maybe three, she has a life there. Her own people, not yours. Not the unit's.
Then it's your posting season again, and it's time to have the conversation again. If you're lucky, like I am, she's supportive and up for the adventure and already quietly looking forward to finding new things for the new place. It still means she sets down everything she just spent two years building and starts the whole process over in a new place. Possibly across a provincial border, which means a new health card, a new family doctor waitlist starting from the bottom, licensure to transfer if she's a regulated professional, a job to quit, a family to prepare.
Wash, repeat. And you can expect it, which is the strange part; you both know it's coming and it doesn't make the rebuild any shorter.
And she has her own translation gap, which I was slower to understand than I should have been. She has to explain to her family why the career restarted again. Why she's job-hunting in a town she didn't choose. She fields friends who hear "you move every three years" and say it sounds exciting. There is no clean civilian equivalent for her either.
Two people, in the same house, both managing a version of the same problem, mostly separately.
I wasn't one of the boys, and it still built up
Here's the part that surprised me looking back.
I was never in combat. I wasn't on a front line. As a technician I worked largely normal hours with occasional travel for training. And temperamentally I'm fairly solitary; I didn't mind being around people, I just didn't build many close connections. I met plenty of people I respect. I wasn't one of the boys.
So on paper I'm the person this shouldn't have accumulated for. It accumulated anyway.
What I noticed was that a lot of people around me seemed to be carrying the same thing. I had no label for it then. I'd call it a translation gap now.
It looked heaviest on the people travelling for sensitive work. There are decompression periods and briefings and mental health check-ins, and they serve a purpose, but none of them prepare you for the conversation at home. You might be in contact while you're away and still unable to say anything about what you're actually doing, so you talk about home. How's work, how's the family, how's everything. You give them the parts you're allowed to give them and you get the puzzled face again.
Those situations were harder than mine and I knew it. Guys coming back from somewhere they couldn't name, walking into a house where the kids had moved on without them and the spouse had held everything together and nobody could ask the obvious questions. Next to that, my problem, nobody understands my job, barely registered as a problem.
But I had something a lot of them didn't at that stage: no spouse, no kids, nobody waiting on me. So I had time, and I put it where it looked like it was needed. Offer a buddy a drive home, because twenty minutes in a car is decompression and it doesn't have to be called that. Stand around the smoke pit. I don't smoke. I stood there anyway.
And here's the part I've only worked out since: I wasn't only doing that for them. That circle was the one place in the day where nobody needed a preamble. Everybody there already had the context, so nothing had to be translated first. We had our issues, like any workplace. But I could say a whole sentence and have it land, and I was getting as much out of standing there as anyone I thought I was helping.
That's where I heard it said out loud, over and over: it's hard to talk about this at home. They just don't get it.
The ones it seemed to hit hardest were the ones with kids. A child has a frame of reference for firefighter, for salesman, for doctor, for electrician. A technician on a fighter jet? So here we go with the mechanic again; except now you're doing it to your own kid, and you can see them lose interest in something you're proud of.
The part nobody warns you about: it gets harder the further up you go
I wanted my degree, so I applied to a commissioning program. For the non-military reader, that's the path from a hands-on technical NCM role to an officer role that's more managerial and strategic.
That period was, hands down, the easiest time I had in the military socially. Someone asks what you do and you say the military is paying for me to go to school. Everyone gets it. No translation required.
Then I commissioned into Logistics as a finance officer, and I figured I'd solved the problem permanently. I manage budgets for the military. Basically an accountant. Clean. Instantly understood. (Yes, I know going from fighter jet weapon systems to finance is a strange turn. I liked the business degree and I had the affinity. Sue me.)
It took a few years to notice that the explanation had stopped being true.
An accountant at a large organisation gives advice, enters some information, manages a small team. Technically accurate. What it leaves out is that in most units you're a one-of-one advisory layer: you, one financial officer above you, and a small team of Financial Services Administrators (FSAs). Some units, it's just you and your boss.
In budget management, and later as a deputy comptroller and comptroller, the weight shifts hard. You're a junior officer sitting in a room with COs and Commanders, people who are your boss's boss's boss, advising them on resource decisions that affect training, missions, and the mundane upkeep that keeps a unit running. You're not the front line. Your recommendations reach it. And you're simultaneously the person making sure nobody trips a wire in a thick stack of financial policy and ends up somewhere they'd have to explain their way out of.
Try explaining that at a dinner table. You're managing allocations in the millions, very early in your career. You say it out loud and people accept it politely, and you can tell they don't quite believe it, and you can't whip out a protected budget to prove it the way you could link a public company's filing.
And in some units, the work is restricted to the point where you can't describe what you do on a given day at all. How do you explain that to someone? Ironically, you can't.
So the shape of my career was this: the more senior I got, the less explicable my work became. Right as the responsibility and the pressure went up. That's the opposite of what people assume. Everyone assumes rank brings clarity. It doesn't. The concrete job was the one I could describe.
What I know now that I didn't then
These are mental stressors. Every single one of them.
Day to day they look like nothing. That's exactly why they're easy to dismiss. Cumulatively it's a real load, and the frustrating part is that the obvious release valve, talk to someone, can make it worse when the person you're talking to doesn't have the context.
Because there's a version of asking for help that costs more than staying quiet. You sit down, you've finally decided to put some of this down, and you spend the first three sessions teaching someone the difference between an NCM and an officer, what a posting is, why "just move closer to family" isn't a thing. You came in to take weight off. You end up translating again, which is the whole problem you came in about.
That's a large part of why I'm doing this now, and a large part of why I left. It is not where I thought I'd end up.
Both sides of the house have this gap, and neither side has anyone who fully understands them. Which is why the room matters more than most people realise.
It's why my wife Alisa and I built the clinic the way we did, and it's the single thing I'd point to if you take nothing else from this: we train our therapists in military exposure. Not to make them experts on the CAF but to make sure that nobody sitting in one of our sessions has to teach their therapist how to help them. The basics are already there. Some things still can't be discussed, and classified is classified. But the point of view is understood before you open your mouth, either through lived experience; Alisa has been a military spouse for over six years, through two provinces and five homes, or through direct training in military culture and structure that I deliver myself.
That's what we're set up to do. Lived experience plus deliberate training, so the context isn't your job to supply.
So: do a buddy check. It's awkward, it's fine, do it anyway. And it doesn't have to be a crisis to be worth addressing, that's the bar I'd most like to move. Ask yourself honestly whether you're performing at your best while operating injured. You wouldn't ruck 10K with a broken leg. Why carry a mental load for ten years? If you're the spouse: you wouldn't ignore a broken arm, so why let the stress compound across four postings?
Needing a hand doesn't mean you did something wrong. It means you're human. This community is resilient, and stubbornly proud of being resilient; I'm no exception. That's not the same as saying none of us ever needs the load shared.
