Personal Narrative: Post Traumatic Stress Disorders

The rumble turned into a shake that made Amanda and I turn around. The sight was indescribable. A massive cloud of dust darkened the sky. Almost like a tsunami of dirt. One of the towers collapsed. The dust burned my eyes to the point where I almost closed them completely. We ran fast but it felt faster because we couldn't see where we were going. I tripped a few good times. Amanda twisted her ankle so I opened one of the near by cars that was unlocked. I helped her in the car. We both thought this was the safest option and we were both out of breath. We could hardly see out the windows, in fact we couldn't. I pulled out my phone at this point. I had 19 missed calls from my parents because they new I was eating at the Copper Lantern which was near the Twin

So, now suddenly I was in an entirely new environment and scared out of my mind. I could see all of my dreams crashing and burning right before my eyes.

I felt the smoke entering my lungs and blinding me but there was nothing I could do about it. As the fire crept over the island, everything felt so out of control. Oh god, I could have been killed. I cannot believe they were just going to kill me like that.

On September 2nd 2016 my best friend, Ashley Minor, who is a single mom of two, was working her twelve house shift at the hospital. At the end of her shift her life stopped for a short time when she received a phone call that her 8 year old son Teagan, was hit by a car, and had multiple injuries.

My eyes open in a flash, and I’m welcomed by the darkness of my room. The nightmares still happen, and has been for two years. I can’t forget that day, for it still burns in my head.

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.

I ran. I ran as fast as my body would let me. I soon made it to the thick forest and hid behind a tree. I needed to just look around me and gauge my surroundings. I didn't see much of anything at first but soon I noticed smoke coming from quite a few directions.

There was no end, I was breathless, but didn't feel the need to gulp and struggle for air. My eyes were open, I know they're open, but all I could focus on was black darkness, and more black.

Throughout our lives, every person encounters hardships that put a strain on other aspects of our lives. The biggest hardship that I have faced was taking care of my wife after she suffered a severe head injury while at work. The injury was the result of a salad fridge door falling and striking the back of her head, causing her to receive a severe concussion that lead to post-concussion syndrome. As a result, she became completely dependent on me. Some of the major hardships that we faced during these times are finances, helping her cope with her injury while she recovered, and maintaining my 4.0 GPA.

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.

I was recently diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. It is one of my traits that is influenced by nature and nurture. Initially, I had a difficult time accepting this trait. My doctor explained to me that anxiety is hereditary, and not a character flaw. He explained that personality type and traumatic life events also play a role when it comes to anxiety sufferers.

“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.

When I was a child, I moved around quite a bit. It became hard to get attached to places because we were never assured that the sacred spots would be ours for much longer. As I got older, however, I have realized that special places do not have to be dictated by a length of time, and allowing myself to fall in love with a place gave me the roots I had been searching for. While I have not lived in Indiana for several years now, there is something about this certain cluster of trees in Indiana that remain special to me. When I was a child, I saw them as the gateway into Narnia, and during the winter snows I would bundle up in my cheap fur coat my mother bought at a consignment shop and run outside searching for Mr. Tumnus and calling myself Lucy. My imagination gave me the ability to bring the characters I loved so dearly to life. This experience has shown me that providing children with the ability to use their imagination not only provides entertainment, but also allows children to have a safe outlet to cope with traumatic situations, make

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.

The loud sound of the fire from grill exploding sounded as loud as a music concert. I tried to run but my legs were frozen. Instead, I turned my back and shut my eyes as tight as possible. Fear materialized before me. This was my first real experience of fear. I've always seen fear in movies and TV shows but never actually felt it. It felt like a mysteries hand crushing your heart. You soon break out into a sweat. Your body turns solid and freezes in pure terror. The more you think about it, the more scared you get. It is a feeling of pure discontentment. I kept closing my eyes hoping that it was a nightmare and open my eyes and it would not be true. It was unbelievable, a shocking nightmare. What did I do wrong? What went wrong? What if I had been physically hurt? I kept asking myself a million questions in a matter of seconds. This was unreal.