3 Things That Make Or Break Our Dreams During Redeployment
Here’s what is so tricky about the redeployment stage: it can make chasing a dream incredibly easy or downright impossible. As always, we have a choice in how we handle this time. But it starts with knowing where we are at and what our natural tendencies are.
The deployment and redeployment stages bring up similar emotions, usually showing the negative and positive sides of those feelings, respectively. Both last roughly a month as well. I know that when I talked about the deployment stage, I spoke of just putting our dreams to the side for that time. If that was the best thing for us to do, then we should place our dreams on the back burner for that month.
I don’t want to encourage that during the redeployment stage, though. As always, do what is right for you, your family, and your dreams. Only you can truly make that decision. I know in my life, things that I put on the back burner tend to stay there. It takes substantial effort to bring those things back into focus, and when I enter the honeymoon stage after a deployment, I have no interest in changing anything. Then we quickly fall back into old habits, and my dreams get stuck.
The reason this doesn’t happen as much when we shift from deployment to sustainment is because we are actively establishing new routines which help us make room for our dreams. When our spouses get home, we often return to old patterns rather than intentionally establishing new ones. Our dreams also become an essential positive aspect of our life during sustainment. Chasing a dream helps us get through the entirety of the separation. When we enter redeployment and postdeployment, our spouse usually takes over that role (as they should), and if we have pushed aside our dream in preparation for their return, it is much harder to get it back.
As we prepare to enter the redeployment stage, we need to know how we will handle that in relation to our dreams, which comes down to three things:
1. What dream are we chasing
A significant determining factor will be what dream we are chasing. Our ability to maintain focus on it will depend on how big or small it is, how short or long-term it is, and how close we are to the ALWAYS DELIVER stage. If our dream was to save up for a big trip during the postdeployment period, then we are probably pretty close to the finish line. We’ve got the trip roughly planned and the finances in order for it. The only thing left is for our spouse to get home and leave to get approved. This will make it much easier to maintain focus.
Let’s say our dream was to go on a girl’s trip with a friend who is celebrating her one-year divorceversary. But the date decided on is two weeks after our spouse’s homecoming. We have a decision to make, and there is no right answer. I know for me, leaving my spouse just wouldn’t be an option at that time. I wouldn’t be able to handle it. But it’s also really hard to say no to a dream, especially one that takes a lot of finagling to fall into place. I mean, coordinating people who live all across the country to show up in one place for one weekend is very difficult and something that happens once in a blue moon.
Or let’s take my writing dream, which is very long-term in nature. During the last redeployment phase, I did not handle this dream well at all. I let it go on the back burner, and it stayed there for quite a while. Because, at the time, it was so long-term in nature, and the only accountability I had in place was to myself. That wasn’t a system that I was set up to thrive under.
2. How we handle unknowns
The redeployment stage brings with it a lot of unknowns. Even if we have a date that our spouses are returning on, that will rarely be exactly when they return. Unless they are coming back on a commercial airline and have a ticket in hand (and we all know how reliable air travel is these days), there are a number of things that could change their return date. The replacement crew could be delayed. The plane to bring them home could be delayed. There could be flight crew issues at the halfway point like my husband ran into on his return. Customs could take way longer than we thought it would. And while these delays may add up to them returning at 4:00 instead of noon, they could also shift it from 8 a.m. Monday to 2 a.m. Wednesday.
Those may feel like little changes, but when we are waiting for something big like our spouse to return, every little change can feel massive. That month before they come home is full of changes. Every time my husband and I spoke, the rumor mill was turning, and the return date and time was different. The constant back and forth about when they will get home can be exhausting not just to us physically, but it can also drain our mental stamina and hope in some ways. We have to be prepared for these constant changes and know exactly what we can handle. If we aren’t careful, we can end up feeling the same way we do during the deployment stage.
3. What we do with nervous energy
I talked a little bit about this nervous energy on Monday. I handle this terribly. More often than not, having an excess of anxious energy to get out leads to me sitting down and bouncing my leg. If I do gather the focus to be productive, I move from random task to random task, accomplishing not much more than I would have sitting still. I jump from stripping the sheets to hanging up clothes to reorganizing the closet to making dinner, all before circling back to putting the sheets in the wash, which still leaves me with an unmade bed, a dirty kitchen, and a pile of things to be donated.
Since I know this about myself, I have come up with better ways to manage it, like making lists that are broken down into the tiniest tasks because when I can cross something off, I am more focused on getting it done. I also set myself up to bounce between dreams a little more. Sitting down to write a whole post may not be possible right now, but I can write two paragraphs, then pack a few boxes for our move, and then look at hotels in Ireland before coming back to write some more.
The key to all of these things is knowing where we are at. There’s no right or wrong answer. We just have to know where we are so that we can properly manage ourselves. I would be more on top of my dream today during the redeployment stage because I am not just accountable to myself anymore. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t struggle to focus on the work at hand. It just means that I have better guardrails in place to keep me on track. Redeployment should be an exciting and happy time. This is a fantastic time to work on our dreams because we have the joyful energy that can make us work so well on them. But it is easy to let them slide if we don’t know ourselves and what it takes to set ourselves up for success.