This I bieleve

This I Believe…

I personally believe that I have an unnatural empathy for people with disabilities. It is in people’s nature to fear people with disabilities. I have a huge mass of empathy for people with disabilities and this may be true for a lot of people. My empathy may come from the “natural fear” that I think people get. I have been able to deal with people having disabilities throughout my life. My mother has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She had a rough childhood and a vad previous marriage which made it develop.

It was around the winter months when it hit her hard. I was just going through the pubescent part of my life and I started noticing her head always looking at the ground. She just couldn’t raise it up in public. My family and I would go to church and she would just tell us things like: “I don’t feel well.” Or “I will just go next time.” She would make us, the children of the family, go to the grocery store to get food for that night. All she would do was lay in bed.

I didn’t know why she was like this. Eventually, I asked my father what was going on. He told me that my mother’s past marriage was an abusive one. He also told me that my grandmother abused her verbally throughout most of her young adult life. He told me that she has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I knew what this was only through my grandfather having “Shell Shock.” I asked my father if we can fix it. He told me that it is a seasonal thing and that this year has been really rough on her so these couple of months are for her to recoup.

Seeing my mother in such a deep depression made my heart ache. I hated seeing her so anti-social and lazy. That is the complete opposite of the mother I knew. I suppose that the manhood instinct came about and I felt as if I needed to protect my mother from such things. Not just my mother though but all people who are susceptible to traumatic experiences that happen to them or has a disability. It makes me so blue when I see someone who is down now. Every person I see who looks sad puts me in their mood, as if it was a contagious cold. For a while I thought it was very pathetic. My moods would switch at just a glance of someone.

My mother eventually came out of her depression and made her life worth living again. She talked to us about it and it made her feel so much better. Of course it took her time to get back to normal but she did it.