There is so much that I can't tell you about my third admission, so much I can't remember. Illness blurs the details and the privacy I owe to my friends erases the daily minutiae of the unit. In short, I had been sectioned - section three, six months. A treatment order, that in retrospect, could probably have been avoided. Or maybe that is just what I like to tell myself when I think about it late at night.
I had found myself in a field, shivering in the early evening sun. It was July, I was in love, but still very, very ill. I had been taken on four occasions to our local accident and emergency department that week. I was, as I read later in my unit-admission report, 'no longer manageable in the community'. I was sad, but determined. I was determined to make an exit any way I could. Instead I was flown to Woking, heavily sedated - so much so that I have no memory of the journey there and was deemed 'unresponsive' in my admission interview.
I digress. So many terrible things tar that admission, but there is joy to be found there too. I committed myself to getting better, to incrementally engaging with therapy and to never allow myself to be in that position again.
Eight years later, I am so, so much better - livelier, more hopeful. I am still in touch with several of the wonderful folks I met on that excursion down the rabbit hole of serious mental illness. They are better too, most of them - some have families and children of their own. I am deeply, ineffably proud of them.
The blur of that admission sounds like a gong in my ear sometimes. I think about the person I was then and I want to cry. They were bathed in some much darkness. I want to wrap them up in my arms, bundle them into my car and kiss their eyes, which had already seen too much.
I learnt so much being that ill - I learnt that the spectrum of human experience, of human emotion, is a light so rainbow-tinged and bright that most eyes can't bear it. I learnt that not everyone has family willing or able to visit them every week, that not everyone grew up loved or tolerated. I found that Vimto sweets taste nicer than black coffee and that although there are roughly three hundred calories in a chocolate bar, they are still worth eating. I learnt that joy and hope is worth protecting and that I am too.
It's not a position I would wish anyone to find themselves in, but it's a part of my story and of the stories of many others. No one talks about it. We need to.
Thank you for reading.
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