Personal Narrative: Kaitlyn Krystal Ransom

The name on my birth certificate reads Kaitlyn Krystal Ransom, but when I was born it read Kaitlyn Samantha Burns, and now most people just call me Kai. When you look at me, I am a five foot, four inch ball of fluffy grandpa sweaters and shy smiles. I don't look like the type of person to be considered "mentally ill", except maybe if I had what I like to call the "cute" disorders. "Cute" disorders, for me, are categorized by disorders that people pity or romanticize. Anything that can be "treated" temporarily with soft animals and smiling at strangers and doing anything possible to make oneself feel better is a "cute" disorder. My disorder, though, is far less adorable.

I have post-traumatic stress disorder, which leads to the occasional violent

outburst, nightmares, flashbacks, and general moodiness. I have depression and anxieties, too, which are classified as "cute" disorders, but most of my problems can't be fixed, or even temporarily held at bay. I might not physically hurt anyone while I'm going through an episode or a flashback, but I am well aware of the emotional damage it leaves on others, and myself. Thoughts spin around in my head like a broken record player, skipping back each time and scratching vinyl just to annoy you. It's a sickening cycle of self-hatred and anxiety that, while usually self-inflicted, lashes out at the people I care about from time to time, which has only recently started to slow.
I see people with PTSD from time to time, and at the age of six I even attended a group meeting to try and reel in the oncoming symptoms, but I have not met anyone my age with the disorder.

Each time I met someone with PTSD in Colorado, they were always twenty to thirty years older than me, a war veteran, or something along those lines. I felt terribly alone with the whole situation. As I got older things only got worse, especially with puberty. As a very small child, I was sexually abused, and I grew up with knowledge of the incident, but rarely paid it any mind until I was in middle school. That's when the flashbacks started, and I began to criticize every inch of my skin, uncomfortable with every aspect of my being. I didn't tell anyone, assuming it was just how puberty went for everyone, and simply retreated into a shell of a person, going through the motions in school and acted like everything was fine. Even at home, my parents rarely suspected

anything.
It worked all right, for a while.

I made it all the way until my sophomore year before the PTSD really tackled me. That was the first time I had ever failed a class, and on top of everything I failed not only one course, but two. That's when I realized I needed to talk to someone. I had given up on therapy long ago, probably around the age of eight because it was so expensive just to go and talk to someone, but I still approached my mom about things. I felt defeated and broken, but my mother - who had adopted me at six and looked after me since I was two - insisted that everything would be all right. My adoptive father was busy working, but he was there every step of the way with my mother, trying to get past the little flaws and kinks in my brain and

me.
It took another year for my doctor to actually put me on medicine, but I was grateful she had. The medication stopped my nightmares, prevented me from dissociating, and made me more talkative. I finally felt like I was returning to myself again, though, I wasn't quite sure who that was. I had struggled with my issues all my life, and they were a part of me as much as my ears are. Maybe I wasn't constantly aware of it, but it was still there, and on this new medicine I had to learn how to cope without the PTSD at all. It was odd at first, like relearning how to write in cursive, but I slowly understood it, understood myself. It was my transformation, from Kaitlyn Burns to Kaitlyn Ransom to simply Kai. It's a transformation we all go through, throughout our lives, that was simply brought to my attention.
As Kai, I like to compare myself to a galaxy. My eyes are nebula clusters, my bones the remnants of the brightest stars. Each atom in my body came from somewhere in this universe or the next and that what makes up me. Like the universe, I am constantly changing, growing, expanding. I thirst for knowledge to expand my limits farther than I ever thought possible. I grow with each new idea presented to me about our world or the past or the future. I am constantly changing, morphing into a newer version of me. I may be slow to understand these changes, but they make me so much better in the end. I will never stop changing, but each version of me in each stage of my life from year to year, month to month, day to day, minute to minute, I am still who I am. I am not more, nor less, than I was before. I simply change, and I learn, and I am. I am a dreamer, I am creative, I am larger than life. I am.