CW: mental illness
The days leading up to my psychiatric admission feel more like a movie that I’m viewing rather than moments I’ve lived. I look back and watch the sleepless nights, racing thoughts, 20-kilometre walks, and intense mid-afternoon sadness like it’s someone else’s life. When I’m telling the story of how I walked myself to the psych hospital, I can laugh with my friends about the ways I flirted with all the emergency room doctors and spent my night in observation writing poetry on the walls. It’s only funny when it doesn’t feel like my own life.
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I arrived at the hospital three days after my 21st birthday. The morning after my night in observation, I was shuttled up the elevators to the ninth floor: a women-only inpatient unit. I spent 13 days in the hospital during the worst heat wave this summer. In a freezing cold, air conditioned bubble in the sky.
A curious thing about struggling with an episode of severe mental illness is how quickly my life became smaller. I withdrew from everyone except my closest circle, who I clung to tightly, anchoring me in reality. It becomes easy to wallow in the thought that parts of your identity are falling away. I felt lost in my identities as an engaged student, a poet, an activist, a friend, a daughter. Mental illness is all-encompassing in how it takes over your mind, your body, and your life.
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The first thing you learn in the psych ward is that everybody has a story, and that those stories will gradually leak out of you and fill the five-foot space between your bed and theirs. Psychiatric inpatients are some of the best storytellers that I know. It isn’t my place to tell their stories, because then they wouldn’t belong to them anymore.
I naively expected inpatient to be like Girl, Interrupted with me playing the part of moody Winona Ryder. The reality of serious mental illness and trauma quickly came crashing down on me in the women I met. Many struggled with housing insecurity, most were people of colour and part of the LGBTQ community, some had cognitive disabilities or comorbid addiction issues, and all were recently at a fragile intersection that had led them to need inpatient psychiatric care.
Even with the heaviness of the things that led us to be locked inside a hospital, there were times when it felt surprisingly similar to a summer camp, albeit one for sick people. The bright yellow art room was where I found myself every evening, painting the sky with acrylics on my notebook paper and relishing in the messiness. When the art room closed and we had taken our nighttime medication, we would sit in the common area together. In between episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, we complained about the drowsiness from our Seroquel or our Trazodone. How slow our world felt compared to the outside one.
A psych ward is like an airport, or the subway, or a laundromat. It brings together a random collection of people with one thing in common and puts them in a transient space. This liminality was one of the most magical things about that place, because it made it easier to really, truly hear people. To listen to myself. I cried in front of those women more times than I have with almost anyone in my life. I stayed up late giggling with my roommate who was in her mid 30s, an early child educator from North York. I learned how to make a dreamcatcher from an Indigenous patient who ran a workshop and brought materials from her community that we all paid her for. I spent an evening excitedly waiting with the rest of the ward to congratulate a young patient for attending Narcotics Anonymous for the first time, guided by an older patient in our unit.
Slowly my world began to grow back, as my body and brain were cared for and tended to. I spent hours in group therapy confronting my own experiences, memories, and awareness. I wrote 41 pages in my journal. I realized that I was, in fact, not terrible at visual art. I slowly stopped being scared of the turbulent life I had left behind, and began to ache for a world that transcended the walls of the hospital.
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I was released on a balmy Tuesday afternoon with six bags and a brain buzzing with follow-up care, resources, and friends. I was stabilized by an incredible women-led psychiatric care team, who worked far beyond the mechanics of their jobs to help me. I credit the community of women in my unit with building my world back up again. Some of them I still talk to, others I probably won’t see again. But I left the hospital with the invigorating optimism that I had the tools to manage what will be a lifelong struggle with a chronic mental illness. My first night away from the hospital, I ached for the shifting community I had grown with and lost.
I still hold their stories softly in my exploded brain, with all the new directions they taught me, to grow, challenge, and change my understanding of the world.
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It’s almost September, and I’m getting ready to go back to school for the final year of my BA. I have an overwhelming feeling of being so incredibly old—as if my body bore the brunt of harrowing waves in my past four months of summer. It feels almost cavalier to move back into the sphere of academia, where we spend so much time thinking, not acting. My degree mostly involves thinking about books and lives. How trivial it is to be moving backwards to theorize about the stories of people I feel so inherently connected to, who I consider many of my dearest friends.
It’s strange how such a small piece of my life had such a huge impact on its direction, but it’s hard to quantify the multitude of ways it has since my stay. When we think about fragments, we often consider small moments to keep and save for later. My inpatient stay is a moment that will always exist at the front of my mind in my politics, my skills to manage my mental illness, my ability to do a 1000-piece puzzle in a day, and the photos that pop up on my Instagram feed, tracking the incredible lives of the women I stayed with.
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I wouldn’t wish an inpatient psychiatric stay on anyone, but I would hope this: that somewhere, sometime, everyone is able to learn true empathy for people. Before I went to the hospital, I was an activist for issues related to queerness, dis/ability justice, and racialized experiences. I studied equity studies and lived within a community that was constantly discussing our privilege.
I think we need to work harder to truly break down the differences between sympathy and empathy in our continued work to make our feminism intersectional. To challenge our perceptions of class, and illness, and the faces we put on the movement to break down the stigma of mental illness. The stories we hear are of people who overcome, of people who struggle periodically, of whiteness. This is not my story, or the stories of the women I loved and grew with this summer.
I can’t deny that my ability to tell this story is a privilege, as are the many other experiences that have shaped my identity and made it about more than my struggle with mental illness. It’s August now, and I’m sitting in a coffee shop watching the cute barista and drinking an iced Americano. I have free access to my medications, and I was able to not work full time and to focus on my health during the summer. I have the money to transit to my mental health appointments. I have privilege in many more ways than I can count, that allow me to help manage my health. And even with all of these measures in place, I still struggle.
I want to build a feminism that is a process, one that considers the depth of my privilege and works to understand that using my voice erases the experiences of others. But I do know that every time I pass a shelter or transitional housing space, I wonder if one of the incredible, strong women I learned and grew with lives there. I look for them everywhere: on the subway, at my school, in the hospital parking lot.
And I wonder if they’ll ever have a platform for their stories to be heard.
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