Personal Narrative: Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder

To you, I am just another story to tell. My phone is on, but I haven’t received a text in weeks. You remind me of that every day. You laugh at me, call me a whore, tell me I am crazy. To you, I am just another girl for you to destroy. Depression, you make me physically ill. You make me thoughtless. I can’t concentrate on conversations or school anymore. I am just so exhausted. I look forward to the moment I can crawl into bed and sleep my life away. You made my life not worth living. Anxiety, you lowered my self-esteem. I can’t even wear my hair up in ponytails because you told me my forehead was too big. You told me that everyone was watching me walk down the hallway, judging my plain outfits. You pulled me into extreme isolation. When you

I am disconnected, lacking contact with reality. It happened in an instant and gradually intensified over time. October of 2015, I had just turned 14 and everything was average, mediocre. I was subdued at this time for reasons I cannot recall and hadn’t been talking much in class. The issue commenced in chemistry class in what lasted a second but felt like a lifetime. The class had been divided into groups, and we were assigned to create a poster. After half an hour of doing the entirety of the work myself, the poster was completed, and I was satisfied with it. Each group was to choose a person to represent their group and explain the poster. Fortunately, I was not chosen. After each poster was presented, they were each taped to the whiteboard

Focus! The burden of destructive emotions constantly tarnishes my brain. It is essential that I isolate myself from the pessimistic chain of thoughts. I need to distort myself from the daily trauma and everlasting misery that I encounter. The turmoil has left me forever fatigued and has numbed my mind. My heart is grazed and broken with regret, my soul is haunted by fear and guilt along with my body diseased and rotten. The experience has been morbid and excruciating, I can’t tolerate this anymore.

Throughout my elementary school days, my teachers regarded me as a trouble maker. Most instructors just assumed that as a young boy, I was naturally energetic and loud. My second grade teacher, however, did not see it that way. She told my mom about her hunch, suggesting that I get tested for ADD. My mother however, thought I was just being an overzealous kid. Yet, the bad reports continued. Many teachers said that I was “too loud, disruptive, hyper, etc.”. Finally, I was diagnosed with ADD in eighth grade.

We also got a brother along with a mother and father. He was born with alcohol syndrome because his mother drank when she was pregnant with him. We all had our own bag of problems. I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for everything that happened to me. When I was a year old, one of my foster families didn't strap me into my car seat, and they got into a wreck. The car accident started my PTSD, but after that, everything bad that happened made my PTSD worse. My sister had mental health issues, to the point where the doctors said her mindset would remain at 15 until she's 35.

No one considered that Schizophrenia was the ailment that tormented my brother. We assumed it was just stress and anxiety that stole his nights, his sanity, and his joy. We all believed that it was just a phase my happy, go-lucky, comic brother would get over. After all, doesn't everybody go through these rough patches of their life, and like a phoenix tried through a fire, rise triumphantly? That was my hope for my brother. But as the days progressed, fatigue mixed with delusions consumed my brother’s thoughts and disrupted his ability to function. As a sister, I felt helpless watching my big brother, my hero, and my confidant going through the greatest battle of his life - mental illness. Episodes and psychiatric breakdowns were constant,

“Chantelle! Come over and see this,” my mom whispered as she glided past me towards her client’s chair. I unfolded my nine-year-old self from under the empty hair dryer and gingerly walked over. While peering skeptically at the child’s scalp before me, I began to note tiny bugs crawling by the roots and my eyes followed my mother’s comb tip as she pointed out several nits. This was definitely one of the worst cases of lice she had shown me, and I had seen quite a few by then! As the daughter of a hairstylist, my exposure to skin and hair started at an early age. Growing up in a salon allowed me to observe first hand how significant an impact looking healthy on the outside had on a client’s everyday confidence and self-esteem; a lesson that was later reinforced during my acne ridden teenage years at an all-girls high school. At the salon, I always enjoyed being called over by the estheticians and hairdressers to view interesting cases that ranged from alopecia and cystic acne, to severe foot fungus and poliosis. Since my mother and her employees always recommended physician follow-ups when they spotted something suspicious, I was always left wondering what happened on the medical end of the spectrum. In high school and college, I began to fulfill this curiosity by reading about the science behind skin, hair and nail disorders.

Introduction: I have chosen this subject in order to maybe understand it better, in a way that hopefully it becomes easier for me to deal with it, this condition to which I have become very familiar with, not because I study it but because I am one who suffers from such disorder; this is what I call the side of the coin that no one see. Although I don’t think is such a bad thing, some have given this disorder a serious bad image to which as usual the media have distortion its image to a point where we have become and sometimes feel as if we were in a glass box. By first hand I have experienced how for example a potential job interview changes its trajectory once is discovered that I might suffer from such disorder.

My first encounter with a patient has been rather difficult: it was my mother. When our family used to live in the Philippines, there was an armed robbery in our house. While the intruders left our family alive, their damage was felt. My mother began suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Seeing her suffer pained me. Despite my numerous attempts to calm her, however, she remained distressed. If I had ever understood helplessness, it was problem then. It was the pain of the inability to help someone you love.

I was diagnosed with the disorder at the age of 16, but I’ve been displaying symptoms since I was five. From stabbing my forearm with pens to trying to drown myself in the bathroom sink in kindergarten to suffocation with plastic bags to self-mutilation to starvation and back to self-mutilation. I always thought that life was unfair and it wouldn’t get any better. For a long time, I convinced myself that I was worthless, stupid, ugly, a waste of space and that I was better off dead. I never had days where I was happy and thought I could concur the world. My

This last year has been a rough one for me, mentally and physically. The beginning of the school year I was dealing with some medical issues, which were preventing me from attending my classes. It’s a gastral and thyroid problem that causes me to vomit frequently. I have been having this problem for the last year or so, but it had been progressively getting more intrusive. I'd wake up every morning either light headed or nauseous. Some days I would power through it and go to classes; others I could barely pull myself out of bed. I have a very independent personality, so I didn’t go to the doctor until it got significantly worse. I have attached a copy of my discharge papers from the hospital. My health is still an issue I am dealing with, but I am taking medication and have a health plan in place with my doctor. So far I have yet to experience the vomiting that was once a daily occurrence.

Many characteristics isolate me from the rest of my peers, but my learning disorder has been a burden to my life ever since I was born. While some of my classmates absorb information with simplicity, I sit behind them lost and confused. I have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, more commonly known as ADHD. Although learning is not easy for me, it has given me the ability to find alternative paths to overcome obstacles.

Have you ever gotten so furious before you felt like nothing mattered? They just kept on doing something to you and you just kept on getting mad.Then someone tried to talk to you and you just weren't in the mood to be talked to or bothered . You reacted in a horrible way by hitting and yelling. Well that's exactly what I'm writing to tell you about. How my anger got a hold of me and would not let me go. How I wanted waffles but my mom gave me something else instead.

The following week was our next game and we were extremely ready. We practiced everyday as hard as we could because we knew how close we were to the championship I could almost feel it. The team we were playing was the saints and they seemed as ready has us, but we knew we were going to come out on top. In the first five inning both teams didn't score or get any hits. It wasn't until the the seventh inning when until any one got a hit. It was a little blooper over the second baseman's head for a single that's when we got fired up. The next at bat a double down the third base side was hit. Now there was runners on third and second with no outs, this was our chance to take the lead. The next batter up popped up the first pitch to the catcher

Life before graduation was a struggle for me. I lived in a home that seemed to bring me nothing but pain and anger. I watched someone close to me die little by little every day. I did not live a normal childhood because I was a