An Irreverent Wreck
Healing Trauma Through Tribe: Why Irreverent Warriors Feels Different
For a long time, I thought I was bad at belonging.
Everywhere I went, I seemed to collect people from different worlds. Veterans. Writers. Musicians. Therapists. Baseball players. Hikers. History nerds. Neurodivergent weirdos. The kind of people who can spend three hours discussing philosophy, then immediately derail the conversation with a poop joke.
I never seemed to fit neatly into one group.
For years, I assumed that was the problem.
I thought everyone else had found their people while I kept wandering between rooms, picking up pieces of myself in different places.
Then I found Irreverent Warriors.
At first, I thought it was just another veteran organization.
A hike.
A community.
A chance to reconnect with other veterans.
What I didn’t realize was that it was quietly solving a problem I hadn’t been able to name.
Most organizations are built around a single purpose. A hiking club is about hiking. A therapy group is about therapy. A professional organization is about work. A support group is about support.
Irreverent Warriors somehow refuses to stay in a single category.
The hike is just the vehicle.
Somewhere between the parking lot and the last stop, people end up talking about grief, leadership, divorce, military service, parenting, music, history, relationships, politics, movies, books, and whatever ridiculous inside joke happens to emerge that day.
The serious and the ridiculous coexist.
Nobody seems particularly interested in separating them.
(Photo: Riss Tripp)
One minute someone is talking about a friend they lost.
Ten minutes later the group is laughing so hard somebody almost falls off a bench.
And somehow both conversations feel equally important.
That’s what finally clicked for me.
Irreverent Warriors isn’t powerful because it’s a veteran organization.
It’s powerful because it’s one of the few places where people are allowed to be whole.
I think a lot of us, especially people with trauma histories, spend years dividing ourselves into categories.
The professional version.
The wounded version.
The funny version.
The caregiver.
The veteran.
The parent.
The person we were before.
The person we became afterward.
We scatter ourselves across different rooms and different relationships.
One group gets the serious conversations.
Another gets the humor.
Another gets the intellectual side.
Another gets the grief.
Another gets the stories.
Over time, it can start to feel like you’re living in pieces.
Not broken.
Just scattered about.
Then you stumble into a place where all those pieces are allowed to show up at the same time. Not only show up but actually snap together.
That’s what Irreverent Warriors feels like to me.
Not because everybody is the same.
Actually, it’s the opposite.
The group works because everybody brings different parts of themselves.
The history nerds.
The storytellers.
The leaders.
The comedians.
The quiet ones.
The loud ones.
The people who need to talk.
The people who just need to listen.
Somewhere along the way, all of those pieces become useful.
The longer I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that what I missed wasn’t the Army.
It wasn’t the uniforms.
It wasn’t the schools.
It wasn’t even the military itself.
It was something much harder to describe.
It was the feeling of being surrounded by people who understood the ecosystem.
People who shared the language.
People who understood why you could be laughing and grieving at the same time.
People who knew that humor isn’t the opposite of pain. Sometimes it’s how we carry it.
The military gave me some of that.
Baseball camp gave me some of that.
Certain friendships gave me some of that.
Irreverent Warriors gave it back.
Not because it recreated the past.
Because it integrated it.
It made room for all of it.
The veteran and the civilian.
The grief and the joy.
The storyteller and the investigator.
The person who still has questions and the person who has learned a few answers.
For years, I thought healing meant becoming one person.
Now I think healing may be something entirely different.
Maybe healing is finding places where more of yourself is allowed to exist at the same time.
Maybe that’s why Irreverent Warriors feels different.
It isn’t asking anyone to pick a lane.
It isn’t asking anyone to become less complicated.
It simply creates enough room for the whole ecosystem to show up and come together in symbiosis.