Until The Echo Comes Back Laughing

Part of the shit that keeps me from sleeping through the night is that I can’t make my past feel like mine. It seems like it happened to someone else–someone I knew or read about. There are too many cloudy days to remember what eactly was my fault–what I should punish myself for. So I pretend it didn’t happen.

None of it matters because it wasn’t me.

And this is true, to an extent. My brain was a different brain–think fried egg. Lots of sizzling. Very little talking. Just a fuckin egg, man.

This is why I write so much about it. I don’t call back my hospital days until I sit down to write. It’s here with you, dear reader, where all bets are off.

I’m hoping that one of these days, I’ll read through some of these and think, “what a strong girl.” For now, I’ll scream into the void until the echo comes back laughing.

Here’s a follow up to my previous post. Just over 2 years ago. And I couldn’t be further from the girl you’re about to hear.

Regardless, here she is.

We only had crayons in the psych ward. Pens were dangerous. I used a stub of Crayola–Purple–because it had the sharpest tip. What I wrote is almost indistinguishable, but the general idea is that I was scared. I was wearing blue paper scrubs and two french braids. I had not planned for this; I had work at four.

I had been waitressing at a steak and seafood restaurant for three months, and was making decent money. If I made less than a hundred in tips, it was a bad night. I liked this work. It was terribly stressful and physically demanding, but I could spend eight hours doing what I do best–smiling and talking and moving. All without feeling anything.

Customers–patrons–whatever, would passively comment on my body. Waifish, hollow, 12 year old boy. This is what I looked like. I was a twenty-one year old woman, and I weighed less than I had in fourth grade. 

I had to use my entire body to lift a tray of bloody meat and shrimp. People would offer to help–customers–and sometimes I had to let them. My body hurt every night. I loved it, though; I didn’t have to think. I was supposed to be there at four.

My coworkers were nice enough–lots of pretty blondes and one guy with long hair who always smoked in the walk-in. The cooks bordered on unsettling, but that was fine. I tried a couple dates with one of them, but he liked hunting and bad music. 

Customers liked me–especially when I wore my hair up. They called me cute and tipped well. Who was I to look like a woman?

That morning–the psych ward morning–I had an appointment with my psychiatrist. In order to call a psychiatrist “my psychiatrist”, and to see them every week, one must demonstrate some pretty significant instability.

I called her Stacy.

 For a while that summer, I saw her every day. It was bad; I knew this somewhere, but I couldn’t make it matter. 

Admittedly, if I had to see her daily, I shouldn’t have been working as much as I was. But I was so good at pretending. If I didn’t work, I’d have to be with myself, and I couldn’t have that. On days where I didn’t work, I laid in my childhood bed. I swang on the swingset in the backyard. I took long, scorching hot baths. It was the middle of summer, and I was twenty-one. I should have known something was coming.

For over a year I met with Stacy, and during that time she tried to make sense of me–she couldn’t–so instead we tried Zoloft. Then we tried Remeron, Cymbalta, Prozac, and Zyprexa. Then we tried Zoloft some more. A chemical experiment brewed inside me, and I felt solidly indifferent. 

Short, black, curly-haired Stacy spoke to me like I was standing on the edge of something. Every week she weighed me; every week I was forced stepped onto the scale backwards; every week she was terrified. I remember almost nothing from our meetings other than at some point she switched offices, by which time things were not looking good.

This morning, just like all the others, I went to her new office, which incidentally was in the same hospital whose psych ward I would be admitted to in just hours. Just one floor below the scale, one floor below her worry and my silent nods, my fellow scrub-wearers paced and slept. 

Stacy had the power to put me there, without warning, and this was news to me. There, I would be legally kept until a team of doctors decided I was no longer a danger to myself. 

The appointment was at ten a.m.. Stacy had asked my mom to come, which should have tipped me off. When she knew I needed help, when she knew I couldn’t hear her, she called my mom. 

We sat across from Stacy, who was, “very worried.” My mother, terrified and tearing, agreed. The door opened and the hospital’s head of psychiatry came to sit beside Stacy. 

My stomach felt something other than empty. I thought this might be fear, which was odd. It had been months since I’d felt something.

Words were coming from everyone, but I remember none of them. I only remember being confused, then like my chest was being ripped apart. My mother had started sobbing. Somehow I ended up in her chair with her, clinging to her neck. I was scared. This was fear.

“You will die if we let you go home.” The head of Psychiatry said. His name was Dr. Raj. He said he had been following my case for a while, and had watched my decline.

I had been in treatment twice by this point. Stacy had recommended every week for months that  I go back for a third try. She made a point to say it during every one of our sessions, and I always said no. I refused to go willingly. They’d have to let me die first.

“When something happens, we’d rather you be in the hospital.” Dr. Raj said “when” not “if”. “When something happens.”

 I wouldn’t go to the psych ward–I told them this. 

“If you decide to run, we will send the police.”

I was carted to the ER in a wheelchair, where I was told to strip down, and take paper scrubs into an unlocked bathroom. Shame. Fear. Numbness.

My father was suddenly there. So was a turkey sandwich, which I was expected to eat. My mother and father sat together in my hospital room, silent and pale and tired. I had a blanket and a plastic pillow. I looked at the two people I loved without reservation, and knew guilt. I was sorry. I cried. They cried. 

I was dying.

But this fact felt as real as their love for me–I didn’t deserve to believe it.

After two, three-month stays in treatment, I was here again, in a hospital room, feeling guilt, and then suddenly nothing. How could they love me when I wasn’t even there?

My parents left to pack some of my clothes–nothing with strings. This was the first of many rules I would be expected to follow on the third floor. 

I was alone then with a nurse who was asking me questions and scribbling furiously. After her pen stopped, she told me they were ready for me. “Let’s go, then.” I hated the ER.

She took me into an elevator, which I never used. I told her this. I told her I had been afraid of elevators since I was eight, but she chose not to hear me. I was just another psych ward patient; she saw them everyday. She chose not to hear me. For some reason this was more real than the paper scrubs; this meant that I was crazy. She chose not to hear me.