Finding My Way Back

The military lifestyle demands a unique type of resilience—one that allows you to pack up your life, say painful goodbyes, and rebuild your sense of self in a new location repeatedly. After a prolonged absence from the podcast, I'm finally ready to share what happened during my latest PCS (Permanent Change of Station) from Kentucky to Texas.

What should have been a familiar process quickly spiraled into an emotional and logistical marathon. With children and an aging German Shepherd in tow, this wasn't just another move—it was a military operation requiring morning briefings, a 10-page plan, and the deliberate setting aside of emotions to manage the chaos. The San Antonio housing market threw its own curveballs, from unresponsive agents to unexpected "pet rent" for my elderly dog and tiny kitten.

Just as we secured housing and began to unpack, another military reality struck—a TDY (Temporary Duty) assignment that stretched to nearly 60 days. The irony wasn't lost on me: unpacking boxes just to pack bags and leave again, this time abandoning my family to settle our new home without me. This constant uprooting dismantled the habits that typically keep me grounded, creating a start-stop pattern that impacted my mental well-being.

My journey back to myself hasn't been about starting over, but about starting again—reconnecting with the routines and practices that make me feel whole despite external chaos. If you're navigating your own period of transition, whether military-related or not, this episode offers a raw look at managing expectations, rebuilding habits, and finding your way back to yourself when everything around you keeps changing. Pour your cafecito and join me as we explore what it means to come home to yourself, even when your physical home is in flux.

Chapters

• 0:38 Apologizing for the Absence
• 1:51 The PCS Whiplash Experience
• 6:01 Housing Market Struggles
• 10:56 Pet Rent and Hidden Fees
• 14:28 TDY Disruption and Military Family Life
• 18:42 Rebuilding Habits for Sanity

Transcript

Joa: 0:00

Oh we could, we could fly. Welcome back to have a Cup of Johanny. This season isn't about hustling harder. It's about coming home to yourself, to your voice, to your breath, to the quiet truth that you're still here and you're not starting over. You're starting again. This is your space to reflect, reset and remember who we tell you are. So pour your cafecito and let's begin.

Joa: 0:38

Vasitos, I am so sorry, I can't believe I left y'all hanging, but these next episodes I'm going to explain to you everything that happened, but please take this as my apology. So I got into the office by yelling out Babe, I'm finally recording an episode for my podcast, and that right there should tell you everything. So, finally, finally, I'm starting to get back to myself. I am starting to get back to those things that make me feel like me, make me feel nourished, make me feel like my full self, Joa. So that is what we're going to talk about. I know I missed much of April, but we're going to talk about that. That's going to be my theme getting back to self. Are you all ready? Of course you are, because that's why you came back. That's why you came back. All right, macito. So y'all have heard me.

Joa: 1:55

Before I was PCSing, I had a big move to do from Kentucky to Texas and I accomplished that and I thought that that was it right. I mean, it's nothing I haven't done before. I've been doing this for a little bit and, yeah, nothing I haven't done before, but it took me out right, it took me out because there were several things in there that it was like oof whiplash. It was now we had the babies with us that we had to take that into consideration. We had our dog, who is now older. You know we had to take that into consideration. So if you're a pet owner and you're listening to this, you know that there's a few things that just change when your pets go. When your pets they go from being young into their quote unquote teenage years and then all of a sudden it's like whew, they're elderly, right, so yeah, and that's where Lady is at. So it means more potty breaks, it means she gets anxious just a little bit more and she needs to be consoled a little bit more, and all of that kind of stuff. And then with the babies as well, I mean they're not babies, they're grown. But I mean we say babies. Of course that's like additional as well, where it's like we have to kind of like corral the troops, as I like to say, before we stop and then before we go, so that way we're all connected, we all understand what we're doing. As I like to say, we all understand what we're doing when we hit target.

Joa: 3:41

I militarized the crap out of this move. You, you don't understand Like I had briefings in the mornings, briefings in the evening with the family, just to make sure that we all had shared understanding of the situation and we all understood our roles in this mission moving from Kentucky to Texas with a layover in El Paso. So that way we can go and have a little bit of fun. So, all jokes aside, I mean what I didn't take into consideration was the emotional whiplash of the PCSing period, and I already knew this from talking to my therapist that just saying goodbye is very hard for me. It still is. Like you heard me saying I've been doing this for quite a while now. I should be like really apt at it, but like I was telling my therapist a while back, I was like it just it doesn't get any easier for me that whole part of saying goodbye to this set of people, some who I have learned to love deeply and see them as family, right, and it's just now. To have to break away from that and start anew is no easy task and if you all listening have had that experience, you can relate to this. You understand that there's a grieving process that happens. No one is going away permanently, right, no one is dying, but it's like you just know that you will not see these group of folks that you have bonded with and you have learned to love for a very long time, if not at all, right. So it is a big emotional whiplash, something that I, just because of the sake of the move and the sake of so many moving pieces, like I wrote out this plan that turned into like a 10 page dissertation with all the stops, what we were going to do and then the different things that we needed to do there logistically for our move, and it was exhausting. So, kind of looking at that plan, I understood like, well, Johanny, you don't have any time for your feelings during this move. That's something that you will have to push to the side and that's kind of like what I did intentionally so not unintentionally like I've done before where I kind of like just shoved them off to the side.

Joa: 6:11

This time I was like you know, I understand that I have emotions, I understand that I don't have time, for soon as I got in, there were several things that happened. One was that the housing market was difficult. I didn't understand exactly how difficult it is. Once again, I've done this before, right? So I was not intimidated at all by it. I knew like I would be able to get into a house right away. I just knew it, you know.

Joa: 6:59

But that was a false assumption that I proved false when I got over here. Because, you know, but the way that the houses are arrayed in this city is so unique and something that I had not encountered before. Okay, and it is like it's in loops, right. So you have like an inner loop, you have an outer loop, you have another outer loop, right. And I know that I wanted a good neighborhood, good schools for the kiddos as one, but I also didn't want it to have like an hour long commute, so I wanted to have like a happy medium. If somebody was going to sacrifice, it was going to be me in my commute, right? But of course that's not. I'm not jumping in on that right away. So of course I'm going to try to find something that is close and it's also a good neighborhood and has good schools for the kids.

Joa: 7:56

So I went about it. I saw, like that this was going to be a long endeavor to do that. So I was like I'm going to have to ask for what we call house hunting days here. So I asked for house hunting days, what we call house hunting days here. So I asked for house hunting days and long and behold, right. Usually it doesn't take you that long, people, usually it doesn't, but it did. If you're from San Antonio, I want you to listen to this. I want you to like help me out. Am I the problem here? Please tell me if I'm the problem here, but I swear it was on the ninth day that I found something, and it was a mixture of a lot of automated houses right that were on the market, as well as houses that were really being looked after an actual human, not an automated system. So I had to deal with both of those. I had to get certain apps for the automated houses. I had to wait for phone calls for those that were just solely being kept by humans and, mind you, one of those houses which I really loved and I really thought, yeah, they'll call me back. They never did.

Joa: 9:10

I like, in my heart, I put 80% of my hopes into this rental house, to be honest with you, and that was like perfect. You know it's far away, not too far away, in a good neighborhood. We're kind of close to Randolph not the base where I'll be working at, but, you know, good, good enough. So at least, uh, my husband, the kids right, have access to a base that is close by and and I was like, and I can do that commute, that that's easy enough, you know I can sacrifice in there and it. They never called me and I was like, do I have the wrong number?

Joa: 9:50

I went by the house again, double check, no, it wasn't. I left a message. I sent emails. Nothing, absolutely nothing, right, mind you, I wasn't waiting on that. But I, you know, I was kind of like half-heartedly going through the motions. So, because I really thought that that house was going to come through, you know, I don't know, I don't know why I was so hopeful, like that. I should have like seen all the signs. I saw the signs, right, but I didn't. I didn't see the signs, and yeah, then after like a day or two of waiting.

Joa: 10:30

I remember, like talking to my husband and being like they're just, they're not going to call back. I was like I can't believe they don't want my money, what? What is going on? Like these people don't want renters to go see a house, and I was so close to buying that one because I was like, fudge it all. I mean, if that's what it takes, you know, then let's do it. We already have a house. But I was like that's cool, that's okay, I'll take over this mortgage. My husband has the other mortgage already. It's too easy. Let's go that way then, If that's what it takes to find a house and send totally.

Joa: 11:15

But once again, I prefer a rental because of the military lifestyle and all of that. That way we can just pack it up and go and don't have to worry about maintaining something or leasing something to other people. It sounds exhausting, right? That's because it was right. The month of January was super exhausting for me because it was a culmination of the move saying goodbye, the emotional toll of saying goodbye and then just the prepping of the emotions to be part and meet a new team, you know, and then having all of that come to a screeching halt because now I have to get the family settled and it's not as easy as I thought it would be. That was the month of January for me. All in a nutshell, people, all in a nutshell, and moving on. I finally got a place, but it came with a lot of fees.

Joa: 12:22

Tell me, am I the problem here? I have not rented a place before and I've done this for a while where I require, like, a pet rent and all this other stuff. Mind you, I have had pets since I can remember, since I was like a Sergeant E-5 in the Army, you know, with my kid, because I wanted my kid to have the responsibility of a pet and being able to build empathy over taking care of something, of someone, right, so that way he can grow into a better human being. So I knew pets were important in our household, so I did that early on. But throughout my rental history I've never come around pet rent until here. So now I am paying $100 worth of pet rent for my elderly German shepherd that hides on thunderstorms and my little four-pound kitten.

Joa: 13:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm like hundred really. Have you seen these pets like? Do you know that all they do is lounge. But you know, like that, this was like the one house I was like we'll take it. We'll take it because it's like we can't. We can't be going back and forth Like I had like very little days left. I was like if we don't pick this one, you know, then there's nothing else. Go to a hotel, wait for the whole buying process to work itself through, you know, and all of that. So we ended up picking this house and now we're in this house paying the pet rent along with the human rent and every other fee that they could find to charge us for. Yeah, I'm still a little salty, if you haven't noticed.

Joa: 14:39

But then comes the news that I have to go TDY for an unknown amount of time, go a temporary duty location, and I'm like, okay, okay, it can't be more than two or three weeks, right, I mean too easy. I've done TDYs. I did TDY quite often. In my last studio assignment, too easy. I was there for almost 60 days people, almost 60 days, like a week shy of 60 days.

Joa: 15:12

Okay, I don't know my new house, I don't know the city that I just moved into, shoot, I don't even know the unit I'm in, you know. But I'm going to go on this TDY with them. Nothing I haven't done before, mind you. This has happened to me before quite a few times. I don't know what it is, I guess I just I bring that energy a few times. Uh, I don't know what it is, I guess I just I bring that energy wherever I go, I don't know why, but but I'm like, okay, let's go, let's go. You know, um, I unpack things out of boxes so I can pack them in bags and take them with me and off I go, off. I go completely disconnected from the new house. I just came into the new city. I just moved into my own family who is still trying to settle. So of course there's guilt lingering there because now I have left them to deal with this on their own, you know.

Joa: 16:25

So this right here, and I hope, like, if you don't understand the military, you don't know the military, like, you kind of start to get like a feel for some of the things that we go through and that is like a big thing that we go through and that is like a big thing. And that's why, like military families, they're so precious, especially if they've been solid and together for a while, because these are things that they go on a regular basis. Every time their trooper has to come out for whatever mission or whatever thing that is happening, the family just gets kind of like not left behind. That sounds bad. But they are left to do the settling, to do the stabilizing, to do the household things, kind of like on their own, you know now, with the support of of the unit, because the units usually have a structure that is called like a family readiness group of some sort, you know. But in my case it was like like we don't know the unit, you know. So that's a little. It's a little different. It's a bit of a of an obstacle. That is there as well.

Joa: 17:40

But once again, my husband, he's a veteran, he's a retiree, so it's like he knows what he's doing. It's still, though I feel the guilt because he shouldn't have to do it on his own, but he understands it. He understands it both from the soldier aspect and from the spouse aspect as well, because when we get married we get married in the thick of it. We get married in one of my hardest assignments when I was a first sergeant, so he completely understands the sacrifices that one has to make and things of that nature it's still, it takes a toll. And now, mind you, I haven't really processed my emotions of saying goodbye, saying hello to a new team and so forth. And now here I am in this new mission and things of that nature like resiliency, inner work, kind of like spiritual inner work that goes through in order to be able to function, and that's what I did.

Joa: 18:48

It took me like a week to settle when I was TDY in that mission and then I kind of like had to come to myself and be like okay, Johanny, let's take it like one habit at a time, because I knew that these are the habits that keep me sane. So, since I've been uprooted twice, in a sense, in this instance, my habits kind of had staggered, they haven't been consistent for them to work. Kind of had staggered, they haven't been consistent for them to work. It's kind of like, oh, let me use this example, because we're going through colds right now in my family. So it's kind of like not taking your jarabe, your cold medicine, continuously and then you miss it and then the symptoms comes back, right, and then you start it again, right, and then it eases up a little bit. But then something happens and then you stop and the symptoms come back even worse, right, it's kind of like that with the habits, because it was kind of like this whiplash start, stop, start, stop and so forth.

Joa: 19:57

So after being a week there, I was like, okay, stop, let's regroup, because we need to do something, because we got to be able to function now in this new role and kind of push away and step away from the old one and thinking about the old one and what happened back there, and I will tell you more about that and how I approach that on the habits that kept me sane, which is the next episode. I'll see you all on the next one. Bye. If today's episode spoke to you, share with somebody who's finding their way back too, and if you haven't yet, visit haveacupofjohanny. com for more stories, blog posts and the books that started it all. Thank you for being here. Until next time, be soft, be bold and always have a cup of johanny.