Each semester, the International Essential Tremor Foundation (IETF) awards four $1,000 college scholarships to students who have essential tremor through its Catherine S. Rice Scholarship Fund. As part of the application process, students are asked to write an essay on the topic, “how essential tremor has affected my life.” The following essay is from one of our spring 2019 scholarship recipients.
By Casey Becker,
Swinburne University
During my first year in a psychology degree, I began to shake and was diagnosed with severe essential tremor. This, understandably, made me depressed, confused and distraught. I immediately sought help from a clinical psychologist, and her contribution to my well-being has confirmed that my desire to become one myself was a worthy expedition. During my second year of college I would find myself zoning out a lot. My memory didn’t seem to be what it once was. Then I started having strange head spins with dreams in them. That’s the only way I know how to describe a temporal lobe epileptic seizure (TLE).
Understanding and accepting that both of these conditions may gradually get worse is a difficult feat and becomes more complex every time I have to let another hobby go or fundamentally change the way I do something in order to account for my tremor or epilepsy. I am a curious and passionate academic, but I also have a creative side. My love for drawing, painting, sewing and playing music have often turned from being a source of comfort to a source of stress. However, I did not give them up. I changed musical instruments. I switched from drawing the painting. I found a keyboard that allowed me to write. And I found new ways to remember things even during seizure clusters. Somehow, I managed to complete my degrees full-time, with a HD average (high distinction).
By studying the brain, my disorders have turned from a psychological burden into a fascinating first-hand experience of atypical neural function. I picked up every bio-psychology and medicine elective I could, then enrolled in an applied science honours degree. I hope to use my experience as a clinical psychologist and a researcher to help individuals, while contributing to the knowledge that can improve our understanding of psychology.
I am undergoing a Ph.D. in psychology at Swinburne University. I come from a low SES single-parent family. I am a first-generation high school graduate, and the only person in my immediate family to attend college.