Shortly before I came across Bunker’s op-ed this morning, another article showed up in my feed and on the Medium home page: “Relentless Forward Motion.”

I opened it with low-level curiosity. The piece was subtitled, “The incredible journey of U.N. lawyer and ultra-runner Stephanie Case, who finds solace where others find hell.” The first line references Kabul, Afghanistan, where I also lived in 2011 and 2012, working for the U.S. embassy.

It describes a woman who has adapted to extreme working conditions in every dimension of her life. The danger she willingly puts her body in on a series of running adventures through snow, desert, and war zones, is presented by author Joseph Bien-Kahn as an extraordinary and admirable adaptation to a life of extremes. He writes:

Case’s other advantage is perspective. Both marathons and Ironman Triathlons are races built for Type A personalities — training is precise, and pacing is dissected down to the second. But in the multiday ultras where Case thrives, planning takes a back seat to adapting. And her life in war zones has changed the calculus on her struggle. She’s seen so much worse. She’s lived so much worse. And so she welcomes pain and discomfort with a smile (and, okay, a fair amount of tears). “You have to have enough of a sense of yourself to know what’s safe,” Case says. “But other than that, it’s just about submitting to the chaos.”

Something about this narrative rubs me the wrong way. I set down the article with a sigh. Yet another story glorifying the capacity of a human being to endure, sleeplessly, experiences that would leave most of us broken and probably dead.

I take it personally. I think about my own time in Kabul, when I, too, developed coping mechanisms that pushed me to the extreme edges of myself.

It was Kabul where I got into Crossfit, finding in the small community of people who cheered each other on through difficult workouts-of-the-day, or WOD’s, an antidote to the office environment where people were more often scheming, screaming, and tearing one another down.

I also learned to swim, stayed up late making playlists for 5:30 am “Spinning” classes in a nearby trailer, ran relay races in the dirt, and completed my first triathlon, a makeshift half-Ironman that began in the embassy pool at 1:30 in the morning and ended around 10:00 am with me collapsing in tears after missing the last half-loop of an organized 13.1 around the NATO/ISAF compound.

In Kabul, I took on a hyper-feminized, maternal persona, spending my unfathomable salary on overpriced groceries to cook large meals for my group of friends. That’s also where I attached myself to a man from the security team who played a non-sexual but oddly spousal role for me as my first line of defense against the constant harassment that all of us women under 30 faced on the compound.

It was also in Kabul where I decided to stop the constant forward motion. Instead of continuing to plunge headlong into a lifestyle that demanded continuous sacrifice of my personality, relationships, and personal ethics, I hit pause. I took a year of leave without pay. I declined my upcoming assignment to the Office of Iranian Affairs, managing global public affairs in the midst of the negotiations we referred to as “the Iran Deal.”

I had lobbied hard for the job just six months prior. But when I looked at myself that spring — how dependent I had become on alcohol, extreme exercise, irrational spending, and the pursuit of reckless sex to validate my body and make me feel safe in the arms of powerful men — I saw someone who had unraveled to the point that I would be forever dependent on extreme stress and the focus that comes with it in order to keep going.

I told my closest friend on the compound, “I don’t know how I’ll go back to a ‘normal’ life after this.”

This being the feeling of extreme aliveness that I felt for the first time in Kabul, a chasing of my own nerve endings, an addiction to self-importance, the high of constant danger, the sense of belonging that comes from being in an extreme experience that only the people you’re there with can ever understand.

“Me, either,” my friend said to me. “But don’t worry —you never have to go back to normal. There will always be another war.”

“What does make us, then?” I asked him. “Doesn’t that mean we are dependent on the perpetuation of American aggression abroad?”

He shrugged. “That’s beyond your control.”

I wasn’t so sure. I wondered what would happen if I just stopped. Even for a minute. I wanted to quit; colleagues, mentors, and the Foreign Service convinced me to take a year of leave without pay instead. The more I slowed, the more reality caught up with me. Instead of coping through extreme behaviors, as modeled for me by the colleagues who drank or fucked or spent or exercised their way through extreme conditions, I started to face myself. I started writing. I began to find my way home.

Along the way, I’ve been diagnosed with a handful of mental illnesses: Bulimia. PTSD. Bipolar disorder, later reversed. Brief reactive psychosis with marked stressor. With each diagnosis, I did something radical: I turned toward them. I began to heal.