He Had to Give Himself a Minute. So Did I.

Tuesday night, I was sitting in the audience at Wake Forest Town Hall when Commissioner Nick Sliwinski stood at the dais, unfolded a piece of paper, and asked the room to give him a minute.

He was about to read a proclamation for Mental Health Month. Before he got through the first line, his voice caught. He collected himself. He read on. When he finished, he set the paper down and spoke plainly — about the lapel pins he’d brought and handed out to every commissioner and staffer, about his father watching from Pennsylvania, about a bond they’d built around this subject over a lifetime.

I looked over at my wife. She was wiping her eyes. So was I.

She’s been through all of it with me. She knows why.

I’m a Navy veteran. I did multiple combat deployments supporting special operations forces — joint intelligence work, targeting. Sometimes that meant air strikes. Sometimes it meant sending teams in. You carry the weight of those calls home whether you want to or not. I came home — eventually, in all the ways that word means — to Wake Forest, the town my family has called home for twelve generations.

But for a long time after I got back, I wasn’t really home. Not inside.

I lived for years with the feeling that the other shoe was always about to drop. That someone was after me. That no matter where I was — my parents’ house, a restaurant, a family cookout — I was still, somehow, at war. I couldn’t sit with my back to a door. I took strange routes everywhere I went, changed my phone number repeatedly, scrubbed my social media presence over and over. I would leave family functions halfway through without telling anyone, without being able to explain why. I just had to go.

It was tormenting. Not dramatic — just relentless. A low-grade, exhausting siege on my own mind that I couldn’t explain to the people who loved me, and honestly couldn’t fully explain to myself.

That was PTSD. Probably some other things alongside it, too.

Waking up soaked in sweat was a regular occurrence. Some nights I’d move to the couch to stop thrashing. After enough of those nights, my wife Jamie was the one ending up out there. She never once made me feel like a burden for it. But I knew what it cost her, and I knew what it cost us.

My brain was damaged in certain ways by what I experienced at war. That’s not a metaphor or an exaggeration — it’s just the truth, and it took me a long time to be able to say it plainly. Years of medication, trying to find the right balance. What finally unlocked something was Cognitive Processing Therapy at the VA Veterans Center out at Brier Creek. That work — slow, hard, nonlinear — started moving something that had been stuck for a long time. And then the rest of it: lifting weights, writing, reading, gardening, time with family and friends. Not as hobbies. As anchors. The accumulation of ordinary good days, one at a time, until you realize you’ve strung enough of them together that you’re actually living again. Since then I’ve been waking up each day a little better than the last.

What I had to relearn above everything else was how to trust myself. To trust my own instincts again, because the ones I’d sharpened overseas — the ones that kept me alive — were now misfiring when in a parking lot off White Street.

It wrecked my confidence in ways I’m still finding the edges of.

I want to be honest about something: for a long time, I genuinely did not think I was going to make it back to Wake Forest. Not back to the town — I mean back to myself, back to the life I was supposed to have here. That felt like something that happened to other people.

So when Nick Sliwinski stopped at that podium and said y’all are gonna have to give me a minute — and then gave himself one — I felt something that I don’t entirely have words for.

It matters when a public official cracks open the door on something this hard. Not because it fixes anything, and not because a proclamation is a policy. But because stigma — real, grinding stigma — still kills people. It keeps veterans from seeking help. It keeps families from talking. It keeps people inside their own heads when what they need is to know they’re not alone in them.

Commissioner Sliwinski brought mental health awareness pins to that meeting and personally handed them to every colleague, every staffer. He called out to his dad watching from Pennsylvania. He did it in public, on camera, on the record. That’s not nothing. That’s the kind of thing that reaches somebody sitting in a room somewhere wondering if any of this is real or if they’re just broken.

You’re not broken. I promise you that. You may need a minute — or a year, or several — but that’s different from broken.

I’ve written before about the ties between war and home, between the person who left Wake Forest and the one who eventually came back. Those aren’t always the same person, and the reconciliation between them is its own kind of long campaign.

What I know now, in a way I couldn’t have articulated before: community is part of the medicine. Not the whole medicine — that requires actual work, actual help, actual time. It required, for me, years of getting the medication right, and a therapist at Brier Creek who helped me get unstuck. But knowing that your town sees you, that a commissioner on a dais on a Tuesday night is willing to let his voice catch in public — that reaches the part of a person that has been quietly wondering if anyone notices.

Community matters. I mean that simply and I mean it completely.

Nick Sliwinski noticed. I’m grateful for it.

Tom Baker IV is a twelfth-generation North Carolinian, a Navy veteran, and a Wake Forest resident. He writes about war, home, and democracy at tombakeriv.substack.com.

You May Also Like

What’s Coming from Raleigh: Key State Legislation That Could Shape Wake Forest’s Future

Apr 21, 2026

Submission: The Silence Worth Saving — A Wake Forest Writer’s Case for the Boundary Waters

Apr 20, 2026

No Kings: A Wake Forest Veteran Against the War on Iran

Mar 28, 2026

Tom Baker IV

Tom Baker IV is the publisher of Wake Forest Matters, Wake Forest's only independent local newsroom. A Wake Forest native, Navy veteran, and intelligence professional, Tom launched Wake Forest Matters to bring serious accountability journalism to his hometown. Tips and story ideas: publisher@wakeforestmatters.com