on the ward #3
my final days of intensive psychiatric care
This series was titled after an essay of the same name from The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun-Wang.
By week 4, I can almost forget where I’m going when I hop in the car every morning. I can nearly pretend I’m going to work. Then I arrive in the lot, park, and take down most of a blunt before I can face a full day of trauma therapy.
Weed is bad for psychosis, apparently. I haven’t been able to stop. I move down the long hallway towards the ward and it stretches out longer in front of me, my steps taking me nowhere closer to the door.
I want hobbies again. I want to see flickers of joy behind my eyelids. I want to write something profound and beautiful that makes it all make sense. I want a poem to fix me. I want transformative creation and I want to be unrecognizable to myself. I want to reinvent each day in a new persona. I want nothing to ever change again unless I say so. I want people to know when I’m right. I want to be buried in an unmarked grave. I don’t want it all to have been for nothing. I want to get my way. I want to defend myself like a guard dog. Don’t get close to me. I want peaches right off the tree.
I made it. It’s my last day. I’m warming my hands under the bathroom tap. I’m making hot chocolate with extra cream. It hurt to dig up my carefully buried past. I’ve screamed myself hoarse reopening wounds for seven straight weeks. I don’t like anything I’m writing these days. I was called smart and well-spoken, and fell over myself trying to disprove the compliment.
What I can’t disprove is the progress I’ve glimpsed through the blinding struggle. I’m making art like I haven’t in years. I’m sleeping better, incrementally, and I’m spending more time out of bed. My skin is clearer. I’m getting bored again.
I struggle to convey what suicidal ideation looks like in me, because I don’t actually want to die. It’s a constant awareness of death sitting next to you in the Uber, at the kitchen table, on the bleachers, for your whole life. Sometimes self harm is going out without your sunglasses, letting the light cut back and brutalize your nerves, shoot pain through your driving eyes.
We capture our emotions in the wild. Despair and boredom, joy, cynicism. A tap of the heel against the barstool's footrest, a dull, chipped affair in cheap chrome and dried beer. It's necessary, probably, for some reason. We have to do the time.
What does grief feel like if you don't give it a shape? Do you only feel it when it fills the mold - death, tragedy, the unthinkable? Does it hover uncertainly in your body during the off seasons, waiting to be given purpose again, or do you move along down the road until it catches up like a stray dog you've been feeding?
Today I worry about bone density and peach pits. I worry that my teeth will fracture out of my skull in shards. I shake and shiver. My phone vibrates and I clench. My mind is empty but for the swaths of fog hanging low over my cityscape.
I’m not ashamed of half the things I should be at least, and I’m plenty ashamed of what’s outside my control. For a moment I’m on a double-decker bus and it’s bright out the front windshield. For a moment I see a future and it isn’t hurting. It’s a mirage on the blacktop.
My last week struggled not to feel like a backslide, but it wasn’t one. It was a dip in the path. The product of retraining a mind and body that are conditioned to flight. It was always coming, always paved into this road. I’m trying. I’m trying. I’m not a very responsible adult. I’m learning to take responsibility for irresponsibility. I’m activating my vagus nerve. I’m trying not to jump to conclusions. I’m on my period. It hurts to shed things.
I am an empty and vast well. I don’t like bulldozers. I walk barefoot on the soil. Yea, your brother’s blood cries out. Yea, his lungs are full of it. Come on home. Oh Lavinia. I crush the globe between my jaws. My compressed spine coils like a spring, a snake, an insect. I hate every choice I’ve made so far. I’d like to start again, if I could. My teeth are gluing together like melting gummy bears. There is an angry man on the other side of the booth wall in my mind’s diner, the one from Pulp Fiction, only with all my lost ones posed stock-still inside.
I’m at the end. I don’t know what I’ll do with myself but live. How I’ll fill my time other than with beauty. How I’ll touch myself if not with love.
I wanted to be fixed by the time I completed the program. What I got instead was more community and more resources than I had before. Different meds. A new support system to integrate with the old. An unshakeable sense of my worth and a deeper understanding of what is and isn’t in my control. I didn’t leave with new chemistry. I didn’t leave a different person, but a more mature one.
I talked about my brother’s death on my last day, so why can’t I remember it? I was met with love and compassion. I don’t recall a word. I want to. I want to remember every second of affirmation I receive and replay the tape over and over again. But I remember the jade and tiger’s eye around my wrist. The tree of life pressed between my thumb and finger. I know I rambled. It was unplanned and unscripted. It was meandering. It bled all over the carpet. It was mine, though, all of it.
If you read all four installments of this series, thank you.