uMwizerwa wa Ngoboka

  The future scares me. The hardest thing for me is to plan for things long term. That has been a trigger for me and it’s something I was actively working in with my therapist close to the end of 2019. The last quarter of 2019 was relatively good for me. I did okay in class and had good support systems in place. In this spirit, I got optimistic about 2020. To be honest, 2020 was my best new year’s day  in a long time. I was staying with a friend and went places with her. This added onto the feeling of hope and I did something I don’t usually do- a list of things I hoped for in 2020. Looking back now, 2020 wasn’t what I expected it to be- just like everyone else. I am going to go through my list and reflect on how things really went.  No episode: This one didn’t work out. I got hospitalized at the beginning of March. However this time was different. I asked for it when I noticed I was spiraling. I wasn’t as worried about recovery as the other times in the past because thi...

In the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about having chronic diseases. What it does to the body and to the mind. I went to see my psychiatrist on account of some symptoms that were resurfacing and it caught me off-guard thinking about it. The culmination of this is a dream I had tonight. I was in a camp like situation and lots of people I knew from different areas of my life were there. On the last day, a friend of mine was not doing well mentally and they asked me to be a sort of counselor for her. I refused because I knew it would be triggering for me, but the person kept insisting. When trying to explain why it was not good for me, how being there for the second time knowing how bad things had gotten since then was triggering enough. And I broke down. Whenever I tell people how I will be on medication until I die, they try to dismiss it. “God will cure you” is the popular one. However, I no longer feel connected to said God and actively distance myself from anything relating...

I first got treatment for a mental health related issue in Rwanda in September 2016, my last year of high school. I met with a psychiatrist but the treatment was more geared towards physical issues like blood flow to the brain. I got a fancy test where they plug stuff on your head and read electrical signals. The test said I was okay. This was what I later knew to be my first hypo mania episode that was preceded by a very long depressive episode. In the doctor's defense, he didn’t have most of the information that could lead to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the beginning of 2018 when I was at MIT. Freshman summer, 2018, my mental health was all over the place. It got especially worse at almost the end of summer. It was the beginning of what would be a long depressive episode. I was taken to ICYIZERE center. This was one of my worst experiences with mental health professionals. I was in a bad shape, but the person I talked with didn’t eve...

This one is from a while ago, so some details will be a bit here and there. The first time I was hospitalized for my mental illness, which is also the time I was diagnosed, I was at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). The story of how I got there is in another blogpost. It was the 28th February 2018. I was sent to MGH for a wellness check. I rode with the MIT EMT. They did my labs and all my minerals and fluids were wack. I had spent almost two months without eating and drinking little water. Even though I got there around 10pm I wasn’t seen by a doctor until 2am.  That was because they were trying to give me fluids so that my levels would get close to normal. They also gave me food. A fruit bar and tuna sandwich.  When I met with the doctor, I broke into tears as one does. I told him the analogy of the tree falling in the forest but life/ death edition. We talked about lots of stuff. At the end of our discussion he told me I have bipolar disorder. I didn’t kn...

I always considered myself as someone who has not experienced trauma. Early this year I took a psychological evaluation test about trauma and scored a 11. It means that I experienced few to no symptoms of active trauma. Talking with my therapist today, I realized that I had experienced a fair share of trauma. My body remembers even though my mind doesn’t want to acknowledge it. I think the very first trauma I experienced was when I first had a severe depressive episode. I had limited to no knowledge of depression, however I experienced it so vividly. I remember sitting on the floor of my dorm’s hallway and wishing it would swallow me whole. Having my body respond to situations I did not know. Like how one day I couldn’t eat because I was so scared and my hands were trembling so I couldn’t hold a fork. For six months I experienced these symptoms, forgot what it means to be happy, or how it feels like. The second time I experienced trauma it wasn’t as intense. I wasn’t sad. I was h...