this piece talks heavily (i don’t think explicitly, but maybe it is explicit to you) about suicidal ideation, psychiatric medication, and my experience being hospitalized. please be discerning if this is tender for you.
this morning i was with the goats and my hospital bracelet was crinkling around my wrist. i’d been wearing it for exactly one week, and it was growing and loosening and coming to sit on the widest part of my palm. i listened to the names of the goats as i wiggled the bracelet down and off my hand. i tucked it in the inner pocket of my jacket, and then felt naked and like i had stepped into another reality.
ten goats are pregnant right now of fourteen, and their due dates are all within the same week. when i put my hand out to one of their faces, she leaned her head into it and i looked into her rectangular pupils. i asked if i could come to the birth, and she nibbled my fingers softly. i put my hands on the right side of her body, feeling the child in her rolling and forming, in awe of how much she could hold.
when i went into the greenhouse and saw how many tulips were getting ready to bloom after being tightly closed, i felt privileged to be in the presence of beauty. i felt so touched, it was like my heart was being wrapped in brown paper and sealed with a sticker. for the past week, my days were spent under fluorescent lights, wandering around a horseshoe-shaped hallway, kicking an orange gently from foot to foot, and eating more than i wanted to eat because i didn’t want to concern my inpatient psychiatrist when she saw on my records that i’d eaten less than 100% every day.
the last few months, from the last time i wrote here and sent it to you, i’ve been hiding. sitting down at my computer, or in front of a blank page with a pen, would turn on a feeling of devastating fear and shame, and not knowing what else to write about but my fear and shame. waking up i was in fear and shame. going to sleep i was in fear and shame. i was not interested in telling you about it. i did not think it would be helpful, or generative, or connective. i felt that the best thing i could do for you was to remove myself so completely that i could not hurt anyone anymore, that i could not embarrass myself any longer by being so disheveled and dysregulated.
there’s a lot more to write about, and there always has been, but i didn’t know how to get there. i stared across the water with floaties blown up around my arms, but stayed ankle-deep because i had not been taught how to swim.
in the last several months, i have made choices that have brought deep transformation and intense emotional stress and distress into my body. when i try to describe how long i’ve been consistently dysregulated which led to this experience of psychosis and hospitalization, i want to start with three years, but then feel it’s more accurate to say six years, and then feel it’s more accurate to say it’s been twenty years, and then feel it’s more accurate to say before i left my mother’s womb. throughout these uncountable years of extreme distress, i have been almost equally experiencing beauty, joy, freedom, bliss, laughter, deep love, delicious food. it’s been the best life i have ever lived. i have never been the kind of depressed that i would stay in bed. i was the kind of depressed that took me outside, made me so busy i could not slow down to feel anything.
“herman hesse called suicide a state of mind — and there are a great many people, nominally alive, who have committed a suicide much worse than physical death. they have vacated life. i did not want to vacate life. i loved life. i love life. life is too precious to me not to live it fully. i thought, ‘if i cannot live then i must die.’”
(i will be quoting jeanette winterson’s book “why be happy when you could be normal” several times in this piece. this book companioned me deeply in the psych unit and i feel extremely recognized by this description of madness.)
i started hallucinating, hearing many voices at once trying to tell me something that some part of me remembered hearing before, but i could not discern what was being said to me. it would happen unexpectedly, in the middle of a conversation with someone, and my body would go into some kind of panic when i couldn’t understand what the voices were saying to me and when i was simultaneously being spoken to by a real person. i would put up my hand but the silence did not help me understand. my eyes became glassy and i became slow to speak when spoken to, blinking hard. i would try to focus my eyes on whoever was in front of me, and feel further and further away, nodding while i still tried to listen to the voices in my head.
i moved apartments, and when i looked at my boxes of unpacked items, i would cry so hard i’d heave and leave. i had a throbbing headache for almost one week regardless of the amount of ibuprofen i’d down. i got in a small car accident driving dissociated — i swore that there was no car coming when i turned left but the red minivan blossomed out of thin air, and i nudged them, and followed them into a mcdonalds parking lot. their car smelled like weed, so we agreed that i could venmo them fifty dollars and then i kept driving.
when i called the crisis line, held to it by someone who loves me and who was heavily concerned by me saying simply and clearly and casually and consistently that i wanted to die, i did not think i would qualify for any kind of care. i have been suicidal since i was first sleeping in my own bed at 5 years old. every night, convinced that the next morning no one would be on the earth except me, i would imagine my own death at my own tiny hand and accept it and go to sleep. i have been normalizing this way out, keeping this door open, for twenty years. i thought everyone had the exit door propped open. how could someone live without the option to die? to me, suicide was more a solution than a problem. i asked my case manager if she related. “isn’t everyone like this?” “no.”
“i was thinking about suicide because it had to be an option. i had to be able to think about it and on good days i did so because it gave me back a sense of control — for one last time i would be in control.” (jeanette winterson, again.)
i’ve been playing with the idea of psychiatric medication for years. i have some kind of fascist fixation on the purity of my body, and fundamental distrust of the government and medical system. i did not want to stop feeling terrible, because i thought that would mean i was not feeling how i really felt. the idea of taking a pill that would make me feel okay about the way the world was, complacent and content in the collapse around me, felt like i would be living in a lie, blocked from my true self. i felt that if i was bad enough to take medication, i was a failure. if i took medication, i had failed to do what i could do to fix myself. i didn’t decide that i would never take it, but held medication as a last resort, another open door that might lead me out of my hole. i felt that even in my years of suicidality, in my detailed plan that i’d go over before bed each night, i was not bad enough to need it, so i kept a bottle of zoloft at arm’s length, kept it tied on a string on a stick that dangled in front of my nose, both leading me and repelling me.
“i wasn’t getting better. i was getting worse. i did not go to the doctor because i didn’t want pulls. if this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. if this was the rest of my life i could not live. i knew clearly that i could not rebuild my life or put it back together in any way. i had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. i only knew that the before-world was gone forever.
i had a sense of myself as a haunted house. i never knew when the invisible thing would strike — and it was like a blow, a kind of winding in the chest or stomach. when i felt it i would cry out at the force of it. sometimes i lay curled up on the floor. sometimes i kneeled and gripped a piece of furniture. this is one moment… know that another…hold on, hold on, hold on.” (jeanette winterson, again again.)
in the psychiatric addiction recovery center, i was not allowed to have my phone unless i was being watched as i wrote down phone numbers onto a scrap of paper. i was not allowed to have my journal, because it has an elastic band holding the pages together, and i did not want my nurse to cut the cord off. i was given a composition book and a crayola marker because pens with sharp points were far too risky. i filled the notebook, writing upon awakening, before sleeping, every in-between moment i had. when i was there, i remembered that writing is the only thing that makes sense. not writing only about my feelings, but writing down what i ate, writing down what music was playing during the morning stretching session (celine dion), writing down what the air feels like the single time we are allowed to go outside per week. recording what is happening around me, who is around me and what they are doing, being the folk journalist of the center, was the only way that i would remember i was there. that i was alive. that i was intending on staying alive, after months - years, in swells and slow waves - of intending not to.
i fell in love with the people who were there with me. the cast felt perfectly and carefully curated by god, the perfect people in the same room as me, all of us at our bottoms. some of us tending a black eye given to us by our drug dealer. some of us vehemently rejecting our nurse’s encouragement to be drugged with enough seraquil to lobotmize us, others asking for seraquil because we were bored. some of us quietly doing crosswords and sodoku. some of us playing game after game of cribbage. some of us shaking and seizing from detoxing the amount of alcohol and fentanyl in our bodies. some of us pacing. some of us weeping. some of us constantly on the phone. some of us spacing out in the middle of a conversation, coming back when we had the capacity to. some of us not sure where we would be going after our insurance ran out or who would pick us up. some of us there for months, no out in sight. all of us at our bottoms, perfectly at our bottoms, caught by the net of each other, given a precious and rare opportunity to spend time together with no phones.
i remember the night before i left, it was around 9 pm and we all sat together tucked on one side of the lounge square. i sat with my back to the wall, leaning, listening. in front of me, my friend worked on the sodoku i taught her how to do. to my right, three women worked on a puzzle and discussed their menopausal experiences. to my left, three men shuffled cards for fun and discussed trump’s choices as a businessman. behind my sodoku soulmate, spanish was spoken between a fluent speaker and a very un-fluent speaker. i sat quietly, looking around, listening and loving. i did not want to leave. i did not need to stay. i had stabilized, touched medication and opened to it, come up with a care plan for the months to come, and received the care i did not know i needed. there is always a wait list for the inpatient unit, and folks who need it urgently. i no longer needed to be there. after only five days, i felt alive in my life, and lit up with how much i loved these people, who were strangers to me five days before, who i would likely never meet outside of the psychiatric hospital.
when i was discharged, i squinted in the sunlight, my heart pounding. i immediately missed my hospital family. before i left, i hugged them all quickly, watched by my nurse, discouraged from physical contact. in the parking lot, eyes closed, i nibbled on a blueberry pancake that i’d saved from breakfast, wrapped in paper towels and snuck out in one of my sweaters. i wept and wept and wept, not because i needed to go back in the hospital but because i didn’t need to. i wept with a hand on my heart because i wanted to be alive and felt tender love and respect for myself for the first time in as long as i could remember. the next few days, i was exhausted. i am still exhausted. but i am alive and very glad that i am, and very glad i went to the hospital. i am very glad i am lightly medicated and plan to stay that way for at least a while. i am very glad that i became so poorly that i concerned my case manager. i am very glad to sit here now and tell you about it.
“i understood twice born was not just about being alive, but about choosing life. choosing to be alive and consciously committing to life, in all its exuberant chaos — and its pain. i had been given life and i had done my best with what i had been given. but there was no more to do there…it was a rope slung across space. it was a chance as near to killing me as to saving me and i believe it was an even bet which way it went. it was the loss of everything through the fierce and unseen return of the lost loss. the door into the dark room had swung open. the door at the bottom of the steps in our nightmares…the door had swung open. i had gone in. the room had no floor. i had fallen and fallen and fallen. but i was alive.”
in the office of my psychiatrist (who told me he wanted to up me from 25 mg of lamictal and zoloft to 150 mg of each but respected my desire to move much more slowly and in small ways) i folded my hands together and looked at his untied loafer. i saw the degrees and certifications and framed fancy things on his wall, but was most interested in his undergraduate degree from harvard in literature and history. when i asked him what his favorite book was, he laughed and said none came to mind. he asked me, “what was the most important thing you learned about yourself while inpatient?”
i looked at the blue sky and bare tree outside. i decided to watch the sunset after my appointment. “that i want to live.”
that’s all for this week. here’s more quoted from jeanette winterson’s book, because i love it and would love you to read it.
“living with life is very hard. mostly we do our best to stifle life — to be tame or to be wanton. to be tranquillised or raging. extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life.
and extremes — whether of dullness or fury — successfully prevent feeling. i know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies — unconscious strategies — to keep those feelings away. we do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. it can work the other way, too — sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life.
it takes courage to feel the feeling — and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. you know how in couples one person is always doing the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable? i understood that feelings were difficult for me although i was overwhelmed by them.
i often hear voices. i realise that drops me in the crazy category but i don’t much care. if you believe, as i do, that the mind wants to heal itself, and that the psyche seeks coherence not disintegration, then it isn’t hard to conclude that the mind will manifest whatever is necessary to work on the job. we now assume that people who hear voices do terrible things; murderers and psychopaths hear voices, and so do religious fanatics and suicide bombers. but in the past, voices were respectable — desired. the visionary and the prophet, the shaman and the wise-woman. and the poet, obviously. hearing voices can be a good thing.
going mad is the beginning of a process. it is not supposed to be the end result.
ronnie laing, the doctor and psychotherapist who became the trendy 1960s and 70s guru making madness fashionable, understood madness as a process that might lead somewhere. mostly, though, it is so terrifying for the person inside it, as well as the people outside it, that the only route is drugs or a clinic. and our madness-measure is always changing. probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. there is no place for it. crucially, there is no time for it. going mad takes time. getting sane takes time.
there was a person in me — a piece of me — however you want to describe it — so damaged that she was prepared to see me dead to find peace. that part of me, living alone, hidden, in a filthy abandoned lair, had always been able to stage a raid on the rest of the territory. my violent rages, my destructive behavior, my own need to destroy love and trust, just as love and trust had been destroyed for me. my sexual recklessness — not liberation. the fact that i did not value myself. i was always ready to jump off the roof of my own life. didn’t that have a romance to it? wasn’t that the creative spirit unbounded?
no.
creativity is on the side of health — it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.”
“there are so many fairy stories — you know them — where the hero in a hopeless situation makes a deal with a sinister creature and obtains what is needed — and it is needed — to go on with the journey. later, when the princess is won, the dragon defeated, the treasure stored, the castle decorated, out comes the sinister creature and makes off with the new baby, or turns it into a cat, or — like the thirteenth fairy nobody invited to the party — offers a poisonous gift that kills happiness.
this misshapen murderous creature with its supernatural strength needs to be invited home — but on the right terms.
remember the princess who kisses the frog — and yippee, there’s a prince? well, it is necessary to embrace the slimy loathsome thing usually found in the well or in the pond, eating slugs. but making the ugly hurt part human again is not an exercise for the well-meaning social worker in us.
this is the most dangerous work you can do. it is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb. that’s the problem — the awful thing is you. it may be split off and living malevolently at the bottom of the garden, but it is sharing your blood and eating your food. mess this up, and you will go down with the creature.
and — just to say — the creature loves a suicide. death is part of the remit.
i am talking like this because what became clear to me in my madness was that i had to start talking — to the creature.”
I would have been deeply deeply saddened had you chosen to leave us. I am grateful beyond measure that you’ve found a way to stay.
Well, access to the rest of your written content was not clear when I wrote the innocuous note below. I went back and saw an arrow, and followed it. Boy, an I thankful for second looks! My first thought was who knew? I’ve been learning that, in the same way, I didn’t know my own daughter, who has struggled, maybe not in the same way, but internally, and painfully. It hurts to know that people I love deeply have hurt deeply and I am too ego-centric to take real note. Please forgive my unawareness. You always have a private room, in my heart, a place at my table, in my home. I admire your courage to share, cry, beautify, and educate.