Our bodies aren’t the only parts of us that scar, our minds can also take damage. This is a fact I’ve always known but it never occurred to me that I myself might carry a psychological scar without even knowing it and I wonder how many other people walk around with scars they don’t know about.

So on the 18th of June 2020, I awoke from my sleep with a single thought, “I have PTSD”, that’s ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ for those of you unfamiliar with the term. It’s defined officially as a disorder characterised by failure to recover after experiencing or witnessing a terrifying event. The condition may last months or years, with triggers that can bring back memories of the trauma accompanied by intense emotional and physical reactions.

I’ll talk about my experience first and why I think I might have it. It happened in a dream, a dream that took me back to a place and time I’d long forgotten about. While I slept today, it began to rain at some time between 4am and 5am, this is my best guess as I didn’t check the time. This point is where my experience begins, I began to dream, a dream so clear, so vivid, so detailed that I thought it was my reality. In this dream I was in my apartment in Lokoja as it rained heavily and I was filled with panic, a fear that swallowed me whole as I looked out the window to watch how the water flowed.

To understand the rationale behind my actions, it is pertinent you know that I spent 4 years in Lokoja pursuing my Bachelor’s degree and in that time Lokoja flooded twice. The first time it happened I wasn’t there as we were on holiday, but the second time it affected me greatly, it happened during my final year, my final two months actually, it displaced me and many others, forcing me to seek alternative accommodation as I had to finish my project and final exams and couldn’t leave the city. I was lucky enough to have good friends who took me in, obviously it wasn’t a lovely experience but I got by quite alright.

The traumatic part of my ordeal happened in the weeks leading up to the flood, every time it rained I’d get scared, every morning I’d wake up and the first thing I’d do is look out the window to see if the water creeped closer at night. On more than one occasion I’d wake up with an elevated heartbeat, not because I had a bad dream but because I feared that in my sleep the water had gotten in and filled my room, I’d have to go out and confirm it was still far away before I could go back to sleep.

You know that falling feeling you sometimes get when you sleep? It was a horrible feeling for me, because to me it felt like floating and it jerked me from my sleep in a panic to ensure I was on dry ground.

In the time period preceding the flood, the rain was my enemy, every time it fell I hated it, but more so, I feared it, because I knew that every drop that touched the ground brought me closer to homelessness. I tried to rent a new apartment in some place where the flood wouldn’t reach but I was in my final year with only two months of school left and every agent told me it would be next to impossible to rent a place for such a short period of time.

So I lived like this, in constant fear and worse, utter helplessness, I hoped for a miracle, I didn’t expect one, but I hoped regardless. I tried to hide these emotions and I think I did it well. I went to classes and I hung out with my friends as normally as possible. Eventually I had to leave the house just before it finally flooded.

So, back to my dream, I hope you now understand why I was looking out the window and scared. So in my dream it was dark, not like the night but more like darkness caused by heavy rains and clouds blocking the sun, I couldn’t see clear enough but I saw the water level rise, flowing slowly outside my walls. I picked up my lamp but it wouldn’t come on, my phone and laptop were dead too, I had no source of light. I screamed at the rain to stop, I was trapped in my house, I couldn’t swim, I couldn’t get out and I couldn’t get any of my property out. I tried to remain calm and then I watched as the water reached my window’s height and began to rush in as my door flung open.

It was at this point that I opened my eyes and saw, to great relief, that I wasn’t in Lokoja, “I’m in Illah” I said to myself over and over again. Illah, my hometown on the outskirts of Asaba in Delta state doesn’t flood, here, we don’t fear the rain, I tried to convince to myself as I watched the rain batter my windows. I had no reason to be afraid and so, just like that I wasn’t afraid, it was just a bad dream. It wasn’t a nightmare, nightmares are usually fiction, I was terrified by what was largely my own memory, be it a forgotten one, a time I was all too quickly dragged back to, a repressed memory, triggered by the rain.

As I cleared my mind I began to think “I have PTSD”, I carried a psychological scar caused by events I thought were long forgotten. We do not talk about mental health nearly enough in Nigeria. Psychologists and therapists are never utilised, our school counsellors are often just religious fanatics who only ever prescribe prayer as medication, with no knowledge of the workings of the human mind. “Suck it up, you be man”, they say to us, I never talked about my ordeal, at least not about the emotional stress it subjected me to, I sought to bury it and now today, nearly 10 months after, these unresolved emotions have come to visit me in my dreams.

I am not a medical personnel, I’m not certified to give advice on these issues, I simply wanted to highlight them, by sharing my own experience. If you have similar problems, be it greater or lesser, I hope you pull through them as I hope that by writing this, I’ve proved to you that you’re not alone, and I also hope that I may have slain the demons of that time that torment me.Take care of yourselves, take care of your mental health, don’t bury emotions, express them!