PTSD changes the day-to-day life of people and families. If you need to have a glimpse of how schizophrenia reflects in people’s day-day life, reading this story is for you. It is a completely anonymized story to achieve confidentiality and privacy of the person(s) involved. Hence, the name(s) used are anonymous.

When the power went out on a humid Thursday night, Amina woke with her heart pounding so hard she thought it might break through her chest.

The blackout brought back the gunfire from the night she and her younger brother had run from masked men four months earlier, the night a neighbor was killed, the night she thought she might die. She had seen the violence with her own eyes, smelled the smoke, and since then those fragments of terror returned without warning.

Memories seized her in the middle of the day – a sudden smell of gasoline and she saw the attacker’s boots; a shout on the street and she felt the weight of someone pressing a gun into her back.

Those moments hit like tide waves she could not control. She called them intrusive memories, but to everyone else they looked like gaps in her morning or a blankness in her face when someone mentioned the neighborhood.

Amina’s dreams did not let her rest. Night after night, she woke sweating from nightmares that replayed the attack in changed, more gruesome forms. Sometimes she woke convinced the men stood in the doorway. Sometimes she woke in the same bed but felt trapped under rubble, as if the world had folded in on her. On bad nights she lived through the scene again, not just remembering, but acting and feeling as though the event recurred – a flashback that made her flinch, drop a cup, or crouch with her hands over her head.

She avoided streets with flickering lights and the market where the robbery had started. She changed her grocery route, skipped the news, and stopped answering calls from friends who wanted to meet in crowded places. Talking about what happened tightened her throat and filled her with shame, so she kept it all inside.

When a police siren wailed past her apartment one afternoon, Amina’s chest tightened, and her palms went cold. Her body reacted before her brain could catch up. She froze, trembling, and tears came without permission. Her reaction seemed out of proportion to the siren’s distance, but to Amina the sound had become a map of the night she nearly died. The same happened when a certain laugh, the wrong cadence, floated from a neighbor’s open window. A simple noise could send her into a sweating, pounding state. The physiological reactions became a new kind of alarm system that ran even when she tried to ignore it.

Avoidance spread beyond places and sounds. Amina deliberately stopped thinking about the attack in the daytime; she pushed the images away so hard that sometimes she couldn’t remember if she had eaten. She avoided conversations that might touch on violence, on safety, on “what happened to you,” because words felt like knives and brought exhaustion that lingered for days.

Friends invited her to a coffee shop near the market, but she declined. A coworker suggested a neighborhood volunteer meeting, she said no, and as the rejections piled up, so did the islands between her and other people.

Her mind gathered new truths, but none of them felt helpful. She believed she had failed to protect herself, and she blamed herself for being “weak.” She started to tell herself, under her breath, that the world was dangerous and that no one could be trusted. Those beliefs settled into daily speech wherein she answered her sister’s questions with suspicion, assumed strangers had secret intentions, and grew convinced the smallest kindness was a setup.

The feelings of fear, shame, and guilt held fast. Activities she once loved, such as the morning walks, the small book club, the pottery class, lost meaning. She stopped going; pottery dust gathered on a shelf while life outside that shelf went on. Amina felt estranged from her sister, who tried to help but seemed to live in a different, safer world. She could no longer feel joy the way she used to. The good moments shrank like paper left in the sun.

Amina’s sleep collapsed into a pattern of shallow dozing and frequent waking. She tried to fall asleep, but her thoughts snagged on the night’s images. She started to flinch at the clang of dishes, and sometimes she snapped angrily at small things such as a late text, or a misplaced key. Her friends noticed her irritability and called it moodiness; while she called it exhaustion.

At times she acted recklessly, driven by a need to prove she still had control. Once, after a confrontation with an aggressive taxi driver, she jumped out and walked home barefoot in the rain, more afraid of sitting back down in a locked vehicle than of the cold. Those choices frightened her later, but in the moment, they gave a brittle sense of power.

Share Your Story: Chat ; Call Us

Send Email – info@arogifoundation.org

Read Part 2: Living with Shadows: A Story of PTSD in Three Lives

Adedeji Odusanya

Odusanya Adedeji A., is a Licensed & Certified Clinical Psychologist whose domain of expertise cuts across management of specific mental health issues such as, Depression, PTSD, Anxiety & Anxiety related disorders, Substance Use Disorder, etc