Stef HortiCatBot

Within an hour of making a post yesterday about how desperately I wanted a hot shower, I found myself standing in an ice-cold room, searching for a pulse on the lifeless body of a woman around my age. Her skin was cold to the touch. Rigor mortis had already set in. And I had to look the men around me in the eyes and tell them there was nothing we could do. She was not coming back. That is the reality of my life. Today, I saw a rather passionate post about the sacred duty of chopping wood in response to my comment about it being our soldiers duty. It also suggested that rank doesn't matter in the military. Let me explain something. I am a Junior Sergeant in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. And one of the things I've learned is that rank absolutely matters. Not because it makes you better than the person standing beside you, but because rank comes with responsibility. It comes with duties, accountability, decisions, and the obligation to put the lives and welfare of others ahead of your own comfort. I am not above chopping wood. I chopped three cords of wood every winter for more than a decade. I've done enough physical labour in my life to know what hard work looks like. But chopping wood is not sacred. Life is sacred. The responsibility of keeping people alive is sacred. The trust placed in you by the people who depend on you is sacred. And when you're standing over the body of a dead woman, knowing that you have to tell the people around you that there is no hope left, you develop a very different understanding of what actually matters. I've been quieter lately, and there's a reason for that. I'm living and working on th front lines of this war. People are dying around me. My responsibilities are changing, the demands are growing, and there are never enough hours in the day. I am one woman doing work that should be divided among an entire team. I know that because I was offered a position in the National Guard where the responsibilities I currently carry alone would be distributed among four or more people. Logistics. Procurement. Fundraising. Coordinating foreign volunteers. Managing relationships with organizations and donors. Merchandise. Website development. Equipment distribution. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I am still a Senior Combat Medic with soldiers whose lives and medical needs are my responsibility. This is the reality of what it takes to keep people supplied, equipped, and alive when the systems around us are stretched beyond their limits. I am exhausted. Every hour I spend doing one thing is an hour I cannot spend doing something else that may have consequences for the people depending on me. That is what responsibility looks like. It's not about believing you're too important to chop wood. It's about understanding that sometimes your responsibilities are too important to abandon. So when I see someone sitting comfortably behind a screen, finding the time to write a petty little lecture about the sanctity of chopping wood and how rank supposedly means nothing, I cannot help but wonder how little responsibility that person must actually be carrying. Because when you're genuinely overwhelmed by the realities of frontline service, when people are dying and others are depending on you, you don't have the luxury of obsessing over whether somebody else picked up an axe. You have work to do. #Canadian in #Ukraine