Life as a cop is undoubtedly difficult. I don't think anyone contests this fact. But I've found it overwhelmingly more so for those of us who are of the female persuasion. And not for the reasons you think, but partly.

The reasons you're thinking are, discrimination, harassment, career blocking, lower pay, distrust from coworkers and public, etc etc. Well, these are all true, but not what I want to talk about today.
I've read the book "Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement" and I often refer back to it when I feel I'm struggling more than usual. The constant state of hyper vigilance, the everyday emotional and physical stress that we put our bodies through, weather we notice it consciously or not puts an inevitable strain on our bodies, and our minds. There's a reason why so many cops have substance abuse problems, family problems, relationship problems. To put it simply, yes, we're fucked up. We see fucked up things. We deal with fucked up people. Some of it rubs off. It takes it's toll after so many years.

I have found myself completely unable to communicate effectively in non-work, social situations. Which is odd for me, because, my greatest skill at work is my interaction with people. For some reason my mind is in a different place when I'm at work than it is when i'm trying to interact normally with people in a regular setting. It's very hard for me to not be a cop at home, so instead of risking being that, I close up and regress into myself for fear of being too unaware of how regular people talk to one another. I always worry about saying something inappropriate, something that most people don't deal with on a daily basis like I do, things that make other people uncomfortable, where for me it's just another day at the office. As cops we have to become 'desensitized' to a lot of things that make others grimace, because if we didn't, we wouldn't survive.

If someone asks me how my day was, I'm worried I might start talking about the 5 year old I interviewed who was sodomized, and how cute and sweet he was, what a great communicator, and how his testimony is going to get me a guilty verdict because he was so amazingly aware and communicative in the interview. If you're not a cop you didn't hear anything I said in that last paragraph except that a 5 year old was sodomized. And I've blown it with trying to make conversation with anyone outside of the 'cop family'.

My biggest success in police work is my relationship to, and good raport with the public. I can talk to anyone in any setting at work, and adjust the conversation accordingly. I can talk to victims, I can talk to suspects, I can talk to children. I can have a casual conversation on the side of the road with someone who's being temporarily detained. I'm good at making people feel at ease when they're with me. (At work).

Yet, I can't talk to my boyfriend. Why? What goes on in a cop's world that prevents us from being who we are when we're in social situations with non-cops?