Every day I felt like I was living in a war zone — not a real war with soldiers and weapons, but an internal one. A psychological battlefield where I was constantly bracing, constantly scanning, constantly trying to make sense of things that didn’t add up. In some ways it felt worse, because it wasn’t a fight I could see. It wasn’t a conflict anyone else could step into or take seriously. It was invisible, and I felt like I was the only one on my side.

And strangely, I wasn’t unfamiliar with that feeling. I had lived in an emotional war zone for years — marriage had trained me in its own kind of endurance. So this new version of pressure didn’t intimidate me. It frustrated me. It challenged me. It woke up the part of me that refuses to back down, the part that wants to win even when the odds are stacked against me.

I don’t give up easily, and I hate losing. It’s not in my nature. But eventually there came a moment when everything clicked into place — not in a triumphant way, but in a devastatingly clear one. I realised the pattern wasn’t going to stop. It wasn’t going to burn out. It wasn’t something I could outrun or outthink or outlast.

And that was the moment I had to accept defeat.

Not because I was weak, but because I was out of resources.

It felt like raising a white flag, and I hated it. I hated stepping down. I hated the idea that I couldn’t outsmart whatever forces — internal or external — were shaping my life at the time. A part of me wishes I had been trained differently, that I had the tools, the clarity, the psychological grounding to navigate it all with more precision. Not to “beat an enemy,” but to meet the moment on equal footing — to understand what was happening instead of being swept under by it.

But it wasn’t a fair game.

And I’ll never know exactly why.

What I do know is this: the moment I realised I couldn’t win was the moment I had to make the hardest decision of my life — to remove my children from the situation. To choose their stability over my pride. To choose their safety over my need to understand what was happening.

It was the clearest decision I ever made, and the one that broke me the most.

There are places in the world where conflict is visible — where the danger is loud, obvious, and named. And then there are the other kinds of war zones, the ones no one else can see. The ones built from fear, instability, and the slow erosion of safety. By the time I realised what I was living inside, the battle had already begun. It wasn’t a fight against a single person or a single event. It was a fight to keep my mind intact, to stay on my feet, to protect four children while the world around us buckled and shifted like unstable terrain. This was the war zone no one warned me about.

I was angry with my ex‑husband. He had walked out on us without warning, leaving me to hold together a life he had already abandoned in every way that mattered. Only later did I understand that his own life had been collapsing long before he left. He could no longer hide the deterioration — the mental instability, the drinking, the drugs, the heavy spending, the erratic behaviour that had been building for years. By the time he walked away, the façade had fallen. What remained was a version of him I had spent years trying not to see, a man whose choices and behaviour had become deeply harmful. It was only then that I finally understood the extent of the damage he had caused, and the danger he had become.

The first moment that truly unsettled me came after he returned from his first overseas military operation. We had been together for less than two years. Something in him had shifted — a volatility I didn’t yet have the language to name. One evening, an argument escalated with a speed and intensity that left me disoriented. I found myself on the floor, his hands around my neck, panic rising as I realised how powerless I was in that moment. A friend of his, who was staying with us at the time, intervened, and the moment broke apart as quickly as it had formed.

Afterwards, he apologised, insisted it would never happen again, and I believed him. I didn’t understand then that this was the beginning — the first crack in the foundation, the first sign that the life I was building was already becoming something unsafe. That was the start of living in a war zone of marriage, one that only grew more unpredictable and more damaging over time.

Later, I learned that during his deployment he had been given the anti‑malarial drug mefloquine as part of a clinical trial. Reports on the drug described severe and long‑term psychiatric and neurological effects, including psychosis, suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety, and cognitive damage. He was subjected to these trials on two separate deployments — and each time he returned a little more fractured, a little more unpredictable.

We struggled over the years as a married couple, and the violent outbursts only deepened the fractures between us. He was away often for work, and he seemed far more at ease when he was gone than when he was home. Each time he returned, the distance grew sharper. He spoke little to me or the children, moving through the house as if we were an obligation he had already stepped out of. The contrast between who he was elsewhere and who he became at home was stark, yet I kept trying to explain it away, hoping the man I once believed in would reappear.

Once he was medically discharged from the military, there was a brief moment of hope — a sense that we might finally be able to start a new life together. We talked about possibilities, looked at options, and rediscovered a shared love of travel. The idea of “world‑schooling” the children gave us something to plan for, something that felt expansive after years of strain. For the first time in a long time, we were moving in the same direction, imagining a future that might repair what had been broken.

He consulted with Veteran Affairs first — the agency responsible for supporting veterans through entitlements, rehabilitation, and assistance for service‑related injuries. At the time, he had not completed his medical assessments, but he still had approval to go. Looking back, he was not in a stable mental state to live abroad. But we went anyway.

And so, to the detriment of our marriage, we left our home country and began moving through the world in search of a fresh start — Fiji, the United States, Canada, Costa Rica, then Mexico. From the outside, it looked like an adventure, a family reinventing itself through travel.

But nothing was going right, and everything was going wrong. While he was with me, it felt as though money was disappearing faster than I could track it. Funds that should have sustained us for a decade overseas were gone within two years. We were spending too much, on all the wrong things, and my ex‑husband didn’t seem concerned in the slightest. And there is nothing more uncomfortable than arriving in a poor country and behaving as though you have money to burn — people notice.

He missed the entire point of a cultural experience. Instead of grounding himself in the place we were living, he spent freely, carelessly, using money he hadn’t earned on his own. Looking back, it felt less like mismanagement and more like a deliberate unravelling — as if he wanted the resources to run out, wanted the situation to collapse, wanted me stranded. That’s what it looked like in the end.

And that’s exactly what happened. He left me and the children stranded, and I was forced to face a situation far worse than anything I could have imagined.

By the time he was gone, the damage was already extensive:

• •Two brand‑new MacBook Pros had become completely unusable, and Apple refused to honour the warranty. We had no choice but to replace them at full cost.

• •One of my external hard drives malfunctioned in Canada, wiping out a significant collection of photographs — years of work and memory, gone in an instant.

• •We faced constant internet disruptions in Panama, Mexico, and Canada, each one adding to the sense that nothing was functioning the way it should.

• •The Dodge Ram had been impounded after a car accident he caused in Mexico. This was after we had already survived one accident due to a mechanical fault, and after the engine had blown up in Canada — each incident draining more money, more stability, more certainty.

What still doesn’t make sense to me is what happened with the Dodge Ram. It was worth around USD $40,000, including the brand‑new engine we had just paid for — and yet he simply left it in the impound yard and never went back to collect it. Later, I was told that someone was driving it around in a nearby town, but I was never compensated for the loss. The whole situation was strange, and it added to the growing sense that things around us were being tampered with in ways I couldn’t explain.

So it was all about bad luck — or that’s how it looked at the time. I had never experienced so much misfortune in such a short period. Two years, and everything had fallen apart. And now there was no money left. But the worst of it was still ahead. When he abandoned us, I was left to navigate the fallout alone, with four children depending on me.

There were nights when I heard movement around the property, inside and outside.

Footsteps on the roof.

Flashlights sweeping across the house from neighbouring rooftops.

Bleach poured over clothing in the laundry, more than once.

A smear of blood on the laundry floor, suggesting someone had been in there and injured themselves.

Then items inside the house began to go missing. The doors were always locked, yet somehow things still disappeared. I couldn’t explain it, and I couldn’t ignore it.

At the same time, money was vanishing from my bank account. It reached a point where I slept with my wallet beside me. I kept asking myself the same questions:

Did someone have a key to the house.

Were they taking my bank card and returning it without me noticing.

How would anyone know my PIN.

Why did it feel like someone had been inside the house when nothing was visibly disturbed.

I would get up in the night, walk through the rooms, find nothing, and go back to bed — unsettled, but with no evidence I could present to anyone. I contacted the police, but there was nothing they could do. Everything I reported fell just short of the threshold for action.

We eventually moved from the property, but by then a lot of our belongings had been stolen — including all my camera lenses, the tools of my work.

At the next house, the disturbances continued. Footsteps on the roof. One night, the sound of liquid being poured above the children’s room — later identified as gasoline. Our food was tampered with. Even the drinking water tasted wrong. I couldn’t shake the questions rising in the back of my mind: was someone trying to make us sick. Does this kind of thing really happen to foreigners living abroad. Had it happened to anyone else.

By this stage, I felt as though I was living inside another warzone that no one else could see. The fear was constant, the uncertainty relentless. I felt like I was losing my mind, yet at the same time I knew I wasn’t imagining it. Something was happening around us — something I couldn’t name, couldn’t prove, and couldn’t escape.

Then my Microsoft Surface Pro began having problems. I took it to a different IT technician because I was worried it had been compromised, but he told me the same thing I’d heard about my phone — that nothing was wrong. Not long after, the device failed completely. I took it to an IT store in a nearby town, hoping for answers. They opened it, pulled it apart, and handed back only the hard drive. The rest of the machine was inoperable.