Student speaker talks PTSD at Technical College of the Lowcountry graduation

Shadena Myers was nervous.

She practiced her graduation speech in front of fellow veterans at the Technical College of the Lowcountry’s Veteran Resource Center.

She’d survived their critiques, she reasoned, so she’d be OK.

“I’m a nervous wreck, but I think I’m keeping it together well,” Myers said Tuesday. “I’ve never really spoken in front of people before.”

She spoke in front of hundreds of them at Friday’s Technical College of the Lowcountry commencement ceremony on Parris Island. The college awarded certificates, diplomas and associate degrees to 379 graduates, Myers being one of them. The mother of two and U.S. Navy veteran received her associate degree in general technology. In June, the Georgetown native will begin pursuing a bachelor’s degree of computer science at the University of Maryland University College.

But on Friday, in front of her family and friends and fellow graduates at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island’s All-Weather Training Facility, Myers talked about her past, the military and PTSD.

Myers, who was honorably discharged from the Navy in 2014, traces her post-traumatic stress disorder back to several years before that. At the time, she was about a year into her third tour of duty, which she served at U.S. Naval Hospital Beaufort. Before coming to Beaufort, Myers, a military police officer, earned her aviation warfare pin aboard the USS Nimitz and served in Bahrain in direct support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

She was in California between deployments in March of 2011 when her friend, a Navy aircraft technician, shot and killed himself.

Her friend died off base. As an MP, she had to assist with cleaning up the scene. She was responsible for inventorying his belongings.

“The smell of gunpowder triggers it,” she said, explaining how certain odors and sights bring back the memory. “Sometimes I have nosebleeds, and that does it for me.”

When Myers left the military in September 2014, she was at a loss about what to do. She worked as a dispatcher for a while, but that didn’t last long. She missed being an MP.

“I would just look at my uniform in the closet,” she said.

She’d just had her first child after struggling to get pregnant. She’d given up at one point, calling herself “broken.” She was unemployed, having filled out dozens of job applications and hearing nothing back from anyone.

It was January 2015 when she found herself hunched over her broken computer with a butter knife. She’d learned the repair trick from a YouTube video. Her husband watched her.

“Why not computers?” she remembers him saying to her.

She was already enrolled at TCL at the beginning of 2015. She was in criminal justice classes, still clinging to her identity as a police officer. But she worried no one would hire a cop with PTSD.

So, why not computers?

Myers changed her classes around. She specialized in networks. Now, when she talks about Active Directory — a network control program that authenticates different users and computers — she gets excited.

She got involved with the Veterans Resource Center at TCL. Her volunteer role at the college’s information technology help desk soon turned into a paid work-study position and later a part-time job as a testing center specialist.

As she wrote in a draft of her graduation speech she shared with The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette before Friday’s ceremony, she can say that she’s “transitioned from a Navy sailor, to a TCL student, to a TCL employee and (now) a TCL graduate.”

There was no mention Myers’ PTSD in the advance copy of Friday’s commencement program the college shared with the newspapers. Only Myers’ achievements — her degree, her family, her military service. Why, then, talk about PTSD?

“Some of us find it extremely difficult to survive outside of the military,” she wrote in a draft of her speech.

Veterans with PTSD, she said, worry that people think they’re crazy. Some vets see it as a sign of weakness. She wants to challenge that perception, she said, saying the “silent killer” is not a “show-stopper.”

A lot of vets have PTSD, she said, “but they don’t want to voice that.”

Maybe because they’re nervous.

This story was originally published May 13, 2016 at 4:15 PM with the headline "Student speaker talks PTSD at Technical College of the Lowcountry graduation."