Dear PTSD – By Simone Powderly
World Mental Health Day 2016
Simone writes a powerful letter to her experience of PTSD, a Mental Health Condition which affects 3 in 100 people. In this letter, Simone describes how it affects her life and her brave fight to overcome it daily.
Dear PTSD – By Simone Powderly
Why can’t you just let go what happened? Why are you still holding on to something that wasn’t your fault? Why do you go back there? What brings you back there? Why can’t you just move on? Why are you scared? Why are avoiding? Aren’t you tired of fighting with me? You won’t win this battle! I tell myself over and over again with you.
I tell you this every night before bed, yet you still keep me laying here for hours or waking up thinking and thinking or it turns into nightmares! You make me go back to the same moments of when I felt in danger, why would you want to do that? Then I have to wake up after only having 3-4 hours of sleep and get on with my day full of anxiety, tiredness & frustration.
It must bug you that I am able to control you throughout the day, to be able to smile, laugh and to my friends and family I am the outspoken, confident, smiley and people person!
Sad truth is, when I come and lay my head down on my pillow that’s when you come because it’s just you and I. We fight often in the mornings where you make me not want to do anything, just stay here in my thoughts, turn my phone off, cancel plans with my friends and with no explanation just go missing because I feel that I can’t tell them about what I’m going through.
I can’t tell them that today is a hard day and I have woken up feeling like I can’t breathe. I tell them I’m busy and as much as that is true, the real truth is that, sometimes I’m busy being exhausted or that I have had such a bad night I won’t remember my plans, because my mind is always going at such great speed.
I could offer you sleeping tablets or medication, but that will give you a false sense of reality and that’s what I have never wanted for us. To heal I have got to be able to face the truth.
I know you have put strain on my life and because of you I have not lived freely as I should, but I’m not about to just make myself numb from it. I’ve got to go through it. So I keep pushing on!
I was officially diagnosed with you when I was 22 years old but we have been going through this for years, since my early 20’s when you were testing my strength and will power. I was a young woman still trapped in childhood of feelings that I had not processed.
I never wanted to be labelled or a statistic, I didn’t want my present to be affected by the past and I didn’t want to blame it on that.
I had choice in my life, to either let it drag me down or I would fight it through healing and I have been working on that for 5 years, I have grown so much in self awareness and confidence that I’ve taken the power away from a situation that I had no control of and I now help to empower others and myself.
My healing will forever be a journey and the best healing for me has been in helping others, the more I talk about it, the more easier it gets for me. Someone once said to me ‘how are you standing their speaking and smiling today’ I said, because I now have the power. I have to remind myself that every day.
Today I might feel that I’m ready to go get em, but in couple days I might work myself up in such a panic, that I feel like I’m falling apart and I can’t cope but it’s being aware of what is going on and using techniques to help you get through it.
To most I am that girl with the BIG HAIR, model, confident, outspoken and always happy! Not many see my weaknesses because I am scared to be taken advantage of, I am only vulnerable around a handful of people.
I wrote this as a letter talking to my condition because that’s what most people have the battle with, their state of MIND. It’s a conversation with yourself constantly because you’re trying to gain control, but I will keep going.
Twitter: @Hairissimba
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