photo credit: h.koppdelaney

On the recommendation of a commenter, I started reading Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl. There is a part where she talks about suicide and depression, and a passage really hit me. Especially after my last attempt I had many people calling me selfish. It’s hard to explain that it’s not that i want to hurt others, I just wanted the hurt of myself to stop. When the pain, emotional and physical, is so strong that all you have left is to look for a way to turn it off you don’t really think about others feelings. Part of you assumes that if you feel so badly about yourself, that everyone else feels just as much or more about you as well.

This passage really hit home with me, so I wanted to write it out, put it out there for others to read.

This is why I feel frustrated now when I hear people referring to suicide as a self-centered act: of course it is. Nobody would commit suicide if the pain of being inside herself, the agony of sleepless, tortured hours spent watching the world get smaller and uglier, were bearable or could be relieved by other people telling her how they want her to feel. A depressed person is selfish because of her self, the very core of who she is, will not leave her alone, and she can no more stop thinking about this self and how to escape it than a prisoner held captive by a sadistic killer can forget about the person who comes to torture her every day. Her body is brutalized by her mind. It hurts to breathe, sleep, eat, walk, think.

photo credit: Markus Rödder

My therapist loaned me two books about writing. One of them is Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. The author is a poet, and you can tell. Each paragraph flows across the page with so much beauty and spirit, it feels magical to just read. I can’t put it down, and find myself soaking in each page as I bumpily roll down the roads on the metro buses that I’ve taken to riding.

I used to write poetry. It high school and my short stint in college, I wrote notebook after notebook of poems about death, heartbreak, and sorrow. I’ve lost all those notebooks, so I don’t know if any of them were any good or not. I know that in middle school I won a Sequoyah writing contest ( I don’t think they do it anymore) for a poem about the awkwardness of that age. I had to read it in front of everyone, which only made me feel more awkward. I had a couple published in those big anthology books they put out every year, the ones that you have to pay $50 to get a copy of. And one year a poem I wrote about a man dying from AIDS was hung up at the UN, along with 1000 other poems, to celebrate awareness.

One of the suggestions in the book is to write about something erotic. I was sitting at the bus stop, with 20 minutes to kill, and suddenly had an idea. Natalie Goldberg, the author, says it’s OK to steal lines from other writers then make them your own. So the first two lines are taken from her book, my inspiration. I don’t know if the poem is any good or not (I never think my writing is any good), but I wanted to share it anyway.

Writers are great lovers.
The fall in love with other writers.
They burn, they blush, they pine
For the caress of words on the page.
They melt with a softly spoken sonnet,
Ignite at a sharp breaking line.
Writers are the lovers of words,
Passionately reaching out
To taste the wine sweet thoughts
That only writers know.
Lapping at the juices
Of syllables and similes.
Tasting each idea
As it brushes across the page.
Each heartbeat
Shared from one writer to the next
Drips from our fingers
For another,
For another.

photo credit: Sarah Jane

I stepped out the front door and heard the man across the hallway say “miss.” I paused for a moment, trying to recognize it. As he walked forward it hit me, we had been locked up together in the hospital.

Suddenly my mind raced. What floor, what floor? Was he one of the detox patients? No, not there. Then I remembered, 3rd floor, home of the psychotics. Like the man who ran around naked claiming he was Jesus. That’s where they put me at first because there wasn’t a bed open with the rest of those with mood disorders.

He was standing right in front of me, asking if I knew a place where he could shower and shave. He said he needed a tie for a job interview. I suggested the homeless shelter on 7th street, I knew they had given me a shower. Sadly he shook his head, they weren’t open on Sundays.

As if homeless people take a day off.

Then his arms were around me, his head buried in my shoulder. He was crying, like a child. I hugged him back, wafting between nervous and compassionate. He needed someone to love him, if even for a minute. I knew that feeling, I had lived with that feeling. He was all alone.

In a flash he was better. There was still sadness in his voice, a helpless look in his eyes, but he had stopped crying. He leaned into my face and tried to kiss me, asking if he could come see me again. I wondered if someone in his mind he recognized my face, maybe had me confused with someone else. I remembered him from the hospital, he had walked around rapping and ducking out of the main room whenever the staff walked in. He’s tall, much taller than me, but thin. He obviously hadn’t had a shower since they released him.

I gently pushed against his shoulders, and he stepped back easily. He let out a soft “OK,” then turned and walked back towards where he came from.

He obviously wasn’t well yet, but they released him. They released him to nothing.

I’ve been reading the book Crazy by Pete Earley. He’s a reported who has a son with a serious mental illness. His book takes a detailed look into the jails and hospitals that many people with mental illness are routinely swept through. It’s scathing and horrifying, and leaves you wondering if we’re really made any progress since the giant asylums of the last century. It leaves you angry at the police, at the lawyers, at the politicians who call treat the mentally ill like animals.

Today, in 2011, they’re still treated like animals.

We’re still still treated like animals.

I sometimes forget that I’m now among their ranks, one of the mentally ill. Officially drugged and hospitalized to keep from doing something stupid. Only I’m lucky. I’m white, and young looking, and reasonably dressed. I don’t hear voices or see things that aren’t there, so the police treated me nicely. They didn’t even handcuff me and let me smoke before taking me away. Privilege at work.

A man at church today talked about how he used to take food to the homeless standing on street corners. He saw one particular woman get arrested 5 times, because begging for money is illegal in certain areas. I wondered if she had a mental illness. Many people on the street due. Most are untreated, because it is illegal to treat someone against their will unless they pose a threat. Even if you think you’re the queen of mars and talking to soda cans, they can’t make you take you medicine. They’ll let you live in filth, or send you through the revolving door of jails and hospitals, before they would ever just make you take your damn medicine.

I wonder what the man from this morning is doing. How soon before he’s back in the hospital, or in jail.

And I wonder if I’ll never snap and be there too.