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Ralph Yarl, the 17-year-old Black teen who was shot and injured after ringing a white man’s doorbell by accident, spoke out a year after the incident. As his shooter’s trial slowly approaches, the teen described how he still lives with the trauma of that awful night.

“It is a constant uphill battle,” the teen told NBC News.

The evening of April 13, 2023, Yarl went to a home in Kansas City to pick up his younger twin brothers. However, he ended up at the wrong house after mixing up the street names. Yarl told police when he knocked on the door, he was met by 85-year-old Andrew Lester, a white man, who was holding a shotgun behind the glass door and snared, “Don’t come back here.” 

Milliseconds later, Yarl told investigators Lester shot him through the front door, striking his arm and grazing his head.

Since that night, Yarl and his family told NBC there was no such thing as going back to normal.

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“It’s definitely a bumpy journey,” Yarl said in his first in-depth interview about how the shooting has affected him one year later. “Whenever there’s something that goes on that reminds me of what happened … I just have, like, such a negative wave of emotions, like anger, like disgust. It’s always a mix of good and bad days. And I feel like the good days are when I’m able to be around people that help me build myself up.”

Family members said Yarl — who still bears an uneven scar on his forehead from the bullet that grazed his skull and left him with a traumatic brain injury — has struggled to reckon with what happened to him.

“Ralph minimized it as if nothing happened,” said his mother, Cleo Nagbe. “But the thing with trauma is that the body will process it when it’s ready. I knew it was coming.”

“At times, he wants to disappear,” she said.

Yarl suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety which possibly played a role in him totaling two vehicles over the past three months, his mother told the news outlet. Vacations were cancelled for therapy sessions, encounters with strangers spark fear and his own friends have grown a new sensitivity to gun violence.

Yarl’s life may never go back to “normal.” However, he’s still made astonishing progress. After suffering a traumatic brain injury from the hsooting, he still maintained his motor skills and vision. He’s been inducted into the Missouri all-state band to play the bass clarinet. Also, in the fall, he’s headed to college to study engineering.

Yet, Lester’s trial looms over the fall semester, as a Clayton County judge scheduled the hearings to start in October, Lester faces charges of first-degree assault and criminal action and entered a not guilty plea.