The Isolation of PTSD

I’m a girl, trapped in a nightmare for the last 12 years. I have bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. And my drowning in despair started when my mother passed away in 2004.

• What is PTSD?

The diseases were already in my brain. They just needed a push, and my mother’s death was that push.

Today, I sit here writing about my experiences to help others like me and 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 — 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 have moved 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 this is difficult for me, and I’m not doing this on purpose. I just can’t move on.

My doctor and therapist says recovery is possible with rigorous therapy and medicines. But is it? Perhaps yes, perhaps not. I am losing faith because I’m still that trapped 20-year-old with no way out.

With post-traumatic stress disorder, there feels like there’s no escaping the monster that has confined you in isolation.

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 that you are stuck in one moment of your life. They can’t feel it.

2. You can’t move to some place 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. And every other place you go to find it 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; it will trigger you. For me it’s hospitals. 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 just can’t. 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’s no freedom.

With all this struggle and stress, my abducted brain is tired. 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.