It's called In Patient

It was 6am as I stood naked in a bathroom getting checked for marks of self harm. I had already turned in my belongings the night before, shoes with laces, wallet, phone, clothes. I kept wondering if I should have done this, if voluntarily institutionalizing myself was the right call. But then they brought me breakfast in bed and I settled right in.

I like the ability to escape, it keeps me going, this time my escape was googling a mental health institute, driving to the hospital, waiting calmly to be called back by a nurse, then bursting into tears as I said I didn't know what to do. He told me I was in the right place and that I "needed to be here." It was jarring and reassuring to hear someone not think this was an exaggeration, you are perhaps just crazy enough to wave away your rights to leave lest you be arrested, and take some time willfully locked up.

I have always been in the middle of the Venn Diagram. One circle is the people who exist in society as normal well adapted individuals, and the other circle does not. I am in the middle, I pass as standard enough in society, but my brain has traditionally been full of bees who never shut up.  

I don't wear headphones to go to the store, but I have left because I was too overwhelmed trying to pick a shampoo. You just wouldn't know that's why I left. I'm not your manic pixie dream girl, I'm just manic and attractive enough that you think I'm in Australia to club or  to find myself, but rather escape myself. The one who quits a nice job by driving 13 hours straight crossing multiple states to get home from a panic attack in Wisconsin.

Room 587 had it all! The architecture was clever, flat buttons to turn on the shower water which was a perfect hot temperature, door handles that just gently slid up and down, a sloped bathroom stall door, a shallow sink. A scant room devoid of corners or fixtures from which you could hang your...hat on lets say. It was clever all the ways people must have offed themselves that were thwarted by whoever had designed this facility. I was impressed by the ingenuity of people on both sides of the Venn Diagram. 

Every 15 minutes a nurse who looked like she would have played college basketball came and checked to make sure you were still breathing. It became deeply comforting.

On my last night in the ... institution I pretended to take my pill. I had checked for cameras around, I know there were some, but not at the pill window. I wore pockets and casually dropped the pill into my pocket before heading back to my room and immediately flushing it.  I had stood in the line joking with my In Patient friends. Friends who you never really expect to see again. I had truly felt safe and protected by this assorted group of humans. Some were unhoused, some had probably been brought in due to drugs, but here I was in this group, laughing. 

So naturally I couldn't take the pill that had been pulling me gently into sleep each of the last 3 nights. Every night at 8pm we gathered around the pill window where one of the staff would check the computer then dutifully measure and cut little pills before handing us our cup. I didn't realize you needed to go to the pill window initially. No one really explains the day to you and "pill time" wasn't on the daily activities board. The day went breakfast at 8am, 9-11am art therapy, 11 lunch, 1pm meet with the social workers to work on coping skills, 3pm coffee (people got real mad if this one was late), 4pm dinner. That was the day, nicely wrapped up by the time most people would be checking the clocks to leave work. It left us a lot of downtime which I filled with Star Trek novels and coloring book pages. Cupcakes, alien planets, cats, I checked the slot each day to see if new print outs arrived. One man who had been detoxing had a room full of mandalas. He slept through art therapy each day, waking up at 11am then asking for more coloring pages to take back to his room. 

There were two phones that looked like old school pay phones in front of the nurses station. You didn't have to pay but you were very much in the middle of everything. No private conversations existed there. I overheard one woman talking about how much she had when she overdosed this time. She was trans and liked metal rock music. In fact there were many trans women in there. It made me sad to realize how disproportionately the clientele was queer/trans. Nothing like having a country against you to turn you to drugs and depression. 

I felt so bad the first day when I missed the coping skills lesson. I had been given a midday pill and fell asleep. It felt like a waste as that was my last opportunity in the day for group distractions. Slowly I poked out of my room more,