#Almost fell out of bed reaching for my Ativan this morning though. And my hands were shaking so bad I almost spilled the pills everywhere.

[iero]

Today was supposed to be my first day back to work from the LOA I ended up taking for my mental health, but I woke up and had a panic attack just thinking about going to work and I haven’t showered since Friday (sorry, gross), so am I really mentally ready to go back?

[leigh-kelly]

On the Inside

Just sharing a little piece I did for my non-fiction class about my first time in a psychiatric hospital.

It’s probably a bad idea to go three nights without sleeping. It’s probably a worse idea to do so while withdrawing from two SSRIs and an antipsychotic. But anyone who has ever been in college knows that sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures and in my sophomore year of college, I had reached those desperate times. If you do either of the two things about, it’s probably a good idea to at least take a nap before you drive two-hundred-fifty miles, but as is apparent, I wasn’t exactly the queen of good ideas in those days.

I drove. It was four days before Christmas and the holiday lights blurred together outside of my window. I had had enough Starbucks double shots to drink that I wasn’t tired, not even in the slightest. I won’t lie to you and say I remember any more than that. The truth was, I shouldn’t have even been driving. As the drugs left my system, I was shaking, jittering, trying to stay afloat in the real world, even as circumstances tried to bring me somewhere else. It wasn’t until I was in my childhood bed at my parents’ house that I started to cry. There was nothing in particular to cry about, my mom had made my favorite dinner as a homecoming surprise and she kept talking about going to get a Christmas tree. But suddenly, after feeling like I was perfectly fine in the car—you know, minus all of the blurry Christmas lights—I couldn’t function in the slightest. 

The last thing I remember before going up to the bedroom was my mother telling me that I was an idiot for going days without sleep and existing solely on espresso. In hindsight, she was right, but at the time, it made me extremely angry. I was twenty years old, I could make decisions about my body for myself. The last thing I needed was her meddling and trying to control me. 

That’s another thing; control. While the primary reason I stopped taking all of my pills was because it was impossible for me to take them and still stay up for three consecutive nights, the secondary reason was control. From the time I was born, I wanted to be in control of everything. As a child, my grandfather called me Sammy Breakstone—from the cream cheese commercial, “the most demanding girl alive”—and it had only gotten worse as I got older. The problem was, as much as I wanted to control my body and not be reliant on medication to exist, it was the only thing that gave me some sense of control. With all of that lost, I could do nothing but cry.

I cried until everyone else went to sleep. I was thrashing and moaning in my bed and after hours of not knowing what was wrong with me, I finally came to recognize that what I was going through was withdrawal—made worse by lack of sleep. For a brief moment, I thought about waking up my mom, but that good old control thing reared her ugly head and I knew I had to deal with it myself. I didn’t even bother to put a bra on, I just crept down the stairs to my car, almost falling like I’d done so many times when I’d gone downstairs to smoke a cigarette after my family had fallen asleep. I was still crying as I got in the car and the Christmas lights were all still blurry, but somehow, miraculously, I made it to the hospital and found my way to the psychiatric emergency room.

Did you know that when you check into a psychiatric facility, they take away your shoes and your cellphone. I guess they don’t want you to hang yourself with your shoelaces or try to call anyone the moment you regret your decision. And trust me, the moment they took away my things, I regretted it. I screamed for a good twenty-minutes about my shoes, begging them to give me them back. I didn’t care as much about the cell-phone. I’d reached the point in my life where I had very few, if any, friends to turn to and I knew that my mom would have lost her mind if I called her at one-o’clock in the morning to tell her I’d checked myself into a hospital without telling her. But the shoes, the shoes were something that really got to me. 

Have you ever seen Girl, Interrupted? I had, probably a hundred times, and read the book at least half as many as that. During that period of my life, I was obsessed with it. It seventeen, I’d been given the same diagnosis as Susanna Kaysen and I thought that watching her be healed would somehow heal me. Spoiler alert, it didn’t. But that being said, watching the movie almost every night did nothing to prepare me for what it was really like on the inside. It was both loud and quiet at the same time. The sound is almost impossible to explain, but that’s what it was. For a while, I was alone in a big room with a dozen stretchers, just sitting, waiting, waiting, waiting. I thought the loneliness was the worst. I was wrong.

If I thought I was making a racket about the shoes, I wasn’t prepared for the next patient they brought in. He was wailing and shrieking and I curled my legs to my chest, trying to shield myself from his presence. While I was alone in my corner, still crying, hours later, doctors surrounded the screamer and someone pulled out the biggest needle I had ever seen and shot him in the arm. What came next, I wasn’t prepared for, and honestly, I thought it was a myth from the movies, but a nurse came running in with a straight jacket and strapped him down to the stretcher that matched mine. 

You’ve probably never seen anyone strapped down with a strait jacket. I’ll tell you this, it’s exactly what you’d think it would be like. As if I wasn’t already afraid before, I was terrified. I kept thinking about how I’d yelled about the shoes and how maybe I was close to being in the same situation. For a control freak, the thought of having my entire upper body restricted sounded like a total nightmare and even though I couldn’t stop crying, the impeding threat of that straight jacket put me on my best behavior.

As it turns out, being on your best behavior in a psychiatric hospital means you get ignored. Of course, I have no idea how long I was ignored for because without a cellphone and without clocks on the wall, I had absolutely no sense of time. All I can say is that with me and the man in the strait jacket trapped in a room with no windows, it felt like an eternity. At some point, my body started twitching and I knew that the detox I was going through was happening in full force, but still, I was left alone.

However many hours later, the doctor came for me. She took me out of the room and into an office, apparently presuming that I could be around pens and picture frames without threatening to off myself with something. I stared at the doctor, she stared at me. It was my turn to talk, I guess, but how do you open up to a stranger when you feel like the world is spinning out of control? I had absolutely no idea, so I took a second option.

They don’t tell you this in the movies, but the easiest person in the world to lie to is a strange doctor in a psychiatric hospital. It would have been easy enough to tell the truth, tell the kind-eyed doctor that I’d stopped taking my medication because I wanted to be in control of my own body for once in my life, that I didn’t want medication influence every single thing I thought and felt. But I didn’t. Instead, I told her that I had stopped taking my prescriptions because I was studying for finals and the pills made me tired. I told her that I was going to start taking them again, I just needed to come to the hospital because I was having a rough time until I started taking them again.

When you lie, they don’t commit you. After however many hours I was in that room, I knew that I didn’t want to spend days and weeks there. All I wanted to do was feel better, just for a minute, and go home to get a Christmas tree with my family. Even with the doctor in the room, the loneliness was suffocating and I just wanted my life to get back to normal. If it meant I had to take the pills again, if it meant I had to give up some of my own control to get some of the chemical control, I was willing to do it.

After I talked to the doctor, she brought me back into the big room. The man was still strait jacketed to his bed, but he was sleeping. The fear of having to spend the rest of the night there set me into a panic and I started crying again. The doctor didn’t say anything when she let me out, so what if that meant she was working on paperwork to make me stay as long as she wanted. I had no idea of the laws of involuntary commitment in New York State and didn’t even know if they applied to me, since I had brought myself there. What if the called my mom? What if she wouldn’t get me out?

I had worked myself into such a state by the time a nurse came in that it was probably more likely that they would have committed me. Instead, the nurse gave me a shot of Ativan and told me to sit back and relax. Easy for her to say, when she got to go home at the end of her shift. Easy for her to say, when she didn’t have to sit on a bed next to a guy who actually had to be restrained for whatever reason.

Once the shot worked its way into my system, I was calmer than I had been in as long as I could remember. I laid back on the stretcher and closed my eyes. Everything in the room faded away and I fell into a deep sleep. Before I knew it, I was being shaken awake and when I opened my eyes, the doctor was standing above me. I took a deep breath and pushed myself up, sitting at eye level with her. I looked down and noticed the papers in her hand and knew what time it was. I was going home.

Of course, in order to go home, I had to lie again. Looking back now, twelve years from the future, lying the second time was a bad idea. The nurse who did my discharge paperwork asked me if I had someone to drive me home. I figured since I’d already driven for four hours while withdrawing and on no sleep, a twenty minute drive with some Ativan in my system wouldn’t be a big deal. So I took back my shoes—finally, I had my shoes again—and I walked out to my car. The Christmas lights were there again, sparkling outside of the hospital, and in my drug induced calm, I took a deep breath. For the first time in days, I felt like everything was going to be okay. 

I drove home, blinded by the lights on the side of the road and sinking into the deepest calm. If only I could actually feel calm like that, without a shot of a benzodiazepine running through my system, I would be great. But maybe I would never be normal, maybe my life would be punctuated by emergency trips to the psychiatric ward because I kept believing that I didn’t need to take my pills. The fact that this wouldn’t be my only time rushing to the emergency room—or in the case two years later, being rushed by my parents who drove into the city where I was living, pulled me from work and forced me into their car because they believed I was absolutely losing my mind—loomed heavily over me as I drove. I thought of Susanna Kaysen again, the book that shadowed me constantly; “Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is… Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.” 

It was five o’clock in the morning when I pulled into my parents’ driveway. It was night four without sleep and I tried to remember how long you were allowed to stay up without totally losing your mind. I guessed that I didn’t have to worry about that much, since I already had, but the Ativan had started to grow heavy in my blood stream, my bones felt like they were carrying the weight of a giant. I clumsily crept back up the stairs to my bedroom and stripped out of the clothes that were tainted by the hospital. I found clean pajamas, left on my dresser by my mom who must have done my laundry—the prodigal first born returns from college, if only she knew I wasn’t such a prodigy but an actual disaster. I crawled into bed and finally, the exhaustion that had creeped into every crevice of my body engulfed me. I fell into a deep, dark, dreamless sleep.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, my mom came in to wake me up. When she left the room, I reached for my purse and listened for the rattle of pills given to me by the hospital. I wanted to fight, I didn’t want to take them, I wanted to be stronger than the need for something to control my psyche. I was a writer, writers needed to feel their feelings in order to express their vision to the world. But then, I thought about the man in the straight jacket, I thought of how I never wanted to go back there, and I swallowed four pills dry. A large part of me felt like I was giving up, but fear won, fear got me in the shower, fear helped me dress and walk back down the stairs.

We were going to get a Christmas tree. It was snowing outside and in any other set of circumstances, it would seem like the perfect day. My mother had her four kids together again. It was Saturday, my father didn’t have to work. We could pretend to be the picture perfect family, even if one of us was still falling apart inside. I went along with it, I got in the back seat of my mother’s SUV and I plastered a smile on my face. I was home, I was supposed to be happy. I had grown so accustomed to playing a part that it wasn’t a challenge for me.

As much as I had always wanted to cut down my own Christmas tree, we never did that. We selected from a bunch of pre-cut evergreens and my sister complained that every single one wasn’t perfect. But what was perfect? I was supposed to be the perfect child, the one my parents pinned their hopes and dreams on, but I wasn’t. I didn’t know then that my mental illness would become so severe that I would have to drop out of school. That I would try dozens of pills to make me better over the next decade before I finally found a combination that worked. All I knew then was that we had to pick out a Christmas tree and that I had to keep my late night visit to the hospital a secret. There was a part I had to play, and I was going to play it for as long as I possibly could. It was probably another one of my bad ideas, to suffer in silence, as you’ve probably guessed, I was never very good at ideas, was I?