Staying in a suicide watch facility is like living in a ghost town. Nurses, doctors and counselors are surrounded by the living dead. Broken souls trudge through the halls, begrudgingly clinging on to life. The mood at a funeral can't even rival the air of sadness that haunts these places, and I was just the most recent arrival in this dismal abyss.
My doctor was a man of short stature. Other therapists and counselors I had visited with over the years were easily manipulated and hardly effective. This guy saw through me. He could tell when I was avoiding a subject or dancing around a question. Rather than coddling me he confronted me. He explored my family life, and my history. One question he asked was "Why do you keep burning all these bridges?". He thought he had me at a loss...he didn't realize who he was to.
"Tell me doctor," I replied, rising to the accusation, "How can you burn a bridge that was never built."
He tilted his head in intrigue. Apparently he wasn't used to patients challenging his analysis.
That first session seemed not long enough for him. I couldn't get out of there faster.
Throughout our sessions we had very interesting conversations. I laid out everything. My abuse as a child, the disassociation from my family, my ever persistent gender confusion, and the debilitating depression it was causing in my life. He told me about the life of Steve Jobs and loaned me the copy of his autobiography he kept in his office for me to read during my stay. I couldn't put it down. The guy was brilliant but he also experienced a variety of hardships in his life. But even so he never let anything stop him from achieving his goals. The doctor said that was what I needed to learn, but failed to provide an idea as to how I was supposed to do that. Little did I realize that my fellow patients would provide such a method, which was simply to observe their behavior and learn from their experiences.
The first person I met, was a young black boy no older than 19 or 20. For the most part he seemed very normal. But I soon learned that he suffered from schizophrenic apparitions. They were so intense that he couldn't focus on a game of Connect-4. I don't know what became of him, but I never saw him after my first full day.
The next person I met was a girl who suffered from manic depression and anxiety. She would be calm, cool and collected one moment and the next she would be yelling and throwing things across the room. She always apologized for her actions afterwards but it was clear that she couldn't control her fits. After my third day, she was moved to the permanent wing.
The permanent wing was separated from the 10-day wing of the facility by only a locked set of heavy doors with large windows. Occasionally I would glance over and see the people who inhabited that space. It was severely depressing to see them. Many of them fit the stereotype you might think of if I was to say "think of a crazy homeless person". But others looked like normal people... Or what used to be. They looked as though their souls had been ripped from their bones. And some of them were people who had down syndrome. Why were they in there? What could possibly be the reason their families would place them in a hell such as that?
The third person I met was a Vietnam War veteran who had tried cutting his wrists. He explained some of the things he had seen, what he had done. These horrors haunted him in his sleep and his waking hours. He tried to kill himself to get rid of the visions. We would talk about astrophysics, philosophy and sometimes he would ramble about Quantum mechanics which I didn't really understand. His therapy sessions did him well. You should've seen the smile on his face when his wife picked him up.
The last person I met was a girl who was about my age, 22 or so. She was pretty, but obviously worn out. She had made an attempt on her life. In therapy she was in tears. She told us she was addicted to heroin. She wanted to stop. She could see the burden she was causing her family. Her parents were going broke taking care of her kids and providing every dime of her medical care. The father of her kids had given up on her and their family, walking out on them only a year before. She so desperately wanted to quit, but her demon had her firm in it's grasp. She was found, hanging from the shower head of her bathroom by her bed sheet on New Years Day.
As I observed these lives in despair, the lyrics of Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles continued to play in my head. "All the lonely people, where do they all come from? All the lonely people, where do they all belong?". As I watched, I slowly began to ask myself "Why am I here?". Not in the existential way either. I realized that all these people had real problems, they all had situations in life they couldn't control. And here I was trying to kill myself because life isn't fair, no one loves me, and I don't know how to love myself. I was a mockery of their plight. While I was certainly struggling and having a hard time figuring out where my life was going, I knew nothing close to the struggles these people were enduring. I felt ashamed.
I knew what I had to do. I didn't know how I was going to do it but I knew that I would have to take whatever steps necessary to become the woman I know I was meant to be. Consequences and others opinions be damned. The only way I was going to be able to love myself and learn to be loved, was to live as authentically and honestly as I could.
No comments:
Post a Comment