I’m a girl who has been trapped in a nightmare for the last twelve years. I have bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, anxiety, and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). My drowning in despair started when my mother passed away in 2004.
The diseases were already in my brain, they just needed a push. My mother’s death was that push.
Today I sit here writing about my experiences to help others like myself, but sometimes it fails to reach me. My life feels like a constant spinning top; spinning around the same incident that changed my life. I feel like there’s no way out of this one and that the only way I can get peace is to go back in time and make things right.
PTSD is a rather frightening mental illness, and the isolation that comes with it is horrifying. You can’t make anyone understand, people around you were able to move on but you couldn’t. You can’t. Sometimes I want the whole world to stop and stay a while with me to endure what I am enduring. I need someone to understand that this is difficult for me, and that I am not doing this on purpose. I just cannot move on.
My doctor and therapist say recovery is possible with rigorous therapy and medicines. But is it? Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not. I am losing faith because I am still that trapped twenty year old girl with no way out.
With PTSD there’s no escaping the monster that has confined you in isolation. In my experience, I have learned the following:
1. You can’t make people understand how lonely you are- Of course you can’t blame people for not understanding because it’s your battle and yours alone. They can’t see or feel that you are stuck in one moment of your life.
2. You can’t move somewhere else and call it home- Every single one of us looks for a home. I’m not talking about the house we live in. I’m talking about the home in our minds. You’re lost without your home, your sanity. And every other place you come across is just another house. You can’t find yourself.
3. Everything is a trigger- Someone says something and it reminds you of that particular moment, and there’s your trigger. You can’t visit the same place where the incident happened for it will trigger you. For me, hospitals are this trigger place. I can’t visit a hospital without getting a panic attack. This makes my life extremely difficult.
4. You’re desperate to get out of the trauma but you can’t escape it- No matter how desperately you try to get out of that particular situation that made you this way, you can’t find relief. You can beg, borrow, and steal for your brain but there is no freedom.
With all this struggle and stress, my abducted brain is tired, and I’m tired. I feel like I can’t do this anymore. I’ve yet to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it feels like forever and I don’t know if I can do it anymore. But I have to keep trying, no matter how exhausted I am, and hope in the future this girl trapped inside the nightmare can finally wake up.
Read more of Tannika’s writing at her Hope is Good page, and read her other posts for IBPF here.