Not too many years ago that would have been it. I discovered during intake that I couldn’t just leave when I wanted; to check myself out would require a 72-hour waiting period. But just years before the door would have been locked behind me and when I wanted to go wouldn’t have mattered at all. The furniture, which was durable and cold and showing wear, would have been industrial, clinical, not welcoming one bit. In an earlier period meals would have been slipped under the door and if I didn’t eat they would have made me. Treatment would have involved a lot of discomfort, pain even, and a cure would have been unthinkable.
At an even earlier time I may have been declared possessed by the devil and flogged, so full of evil and death. We’ve always been scared of a lost mind, and to confess the things I thought and saw would have been the end of me. In another culture I could have been branded a Shaman and people would come to me for potions and fortunes and to be present to see me dance like a madman. Or in another city without means or insurance I’d have just been cast out on the street to suffer and beg for alms, waiting for a holy man to lay his hands on me. Blessed, close to God, insane.
As it was I sat in the day room in a Brooks Brothers cardigan reading Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility, four books they shouldn’t have let into that place, but no one had ever heard of them before, let alone know what was in them. The other patients lay about in pajamas, sat rocking making guttural noises, or walked the halls talking to themselves. All at least as scary as the hallucinations I had been having. It was the weekend, and little was to happen before Monday. I was given drugs that made me very tired and quite numb, and rather quickly killing myself seemed like too much effort to be worthwhile. Each day there was a morning meeting during which a psych-tech reviewed the daily schedule and took a quick inventory of our moods and thoughts. There were no newspapers. Debra visited during lunch and mostly sat with me and cried.
A first psych hospitalization is fraught with fear and uncertainty, but mostly it’s just boring. They’d take my vitals every day, and two or three times each day I’d line up with everybody else at a med cart for pills and water to flush my troubled soul. There’d be lots of sitting around, daily visits from the doctor, group therapy, and maybe a visitor in the afternoon. When I was in my room, even when sleeping, staff would come in every 15 minutes – with less frequency as the days dragged on – to check that I hadn’t hurt myself. I kept a journal, long ago lost, and read a lot.
The other patients were an odd bunch of mixed means and races, ages, and severity of illness. Looking at their quirkiness, anger, and strange behavior led me to realize how much I’d overestimated my own sanity. They spoke of prior hospitalizations as if all this were some subscription service, periodic commitments with automatic renewal, and I wondered what I had signed up for. To be locked in with this group must have meant I was just as sick, and I was unsure how the whole experience was meant to help, let alone make me well. But the drugs and inactivity calmed me down, wore me out, and my thoughts and emotions slowed a bit. A little natural light peered through the tightly drawn blinds to cheer me up. Flowers can grow from cracks in the sidewalk, and my mind brightened, only to suffer again in the drought of a torrid Spring.
The first Monday I met my doctor, Dr. G. He dressed sharp and had a bounding energy; he liked to take his sessions while traipsing through the halls, and my mind struggled to keep up with the pace. While I would try to out dress and outrun him after my discharge, mustering the energy in the hospital was difficult given the meds they were giving me. I felt like a spoon being pulled from a jar of peanut butter: The oil of impulse dropped off quickly but the thoughts were sticky and pulled me back in, or hung from me formless and heavy. I thought I’d never be clean of this experience. Dr. G diagnosed me as severely depressed with psychotic features and medicated me accordingly. I realized I might not again think as fast, or as well, as I was used to, but I wouldn’t be consumed by self-defeat either. I looked forward to looking as good as he did.
The day room loomed very small and was ringed with couches, so I could never find a seat by myself. The TV was always on, and the lights were so bright that the dust that streaked the walls seemed luminescent. Everyone had a roommate. Everyone was so different from each other. The constant interaction between patients reminded me when I spoke to others that I really was alone and had nothing in common with anyone, not even another confined to the same ward that held all dreams of the future hostage to nurses and pills and always open doors. Privacy didn’t exist. A tech sat with me when I shaved, and I considered a beard, but kept shaving and dressing everyday if only for something to do. At night the lights in the hall stayed on and my room was barely dark. The dead I created in my mind didn’t follow me into the hospital, as if the ward was uncomfortable even for them, and I developed claustrophobia that I’ve not since been able to shake; so bad that I couldn’t sleep with the covers pulled over my head to block the inquisitive light. My dreams were no shelter, and the heavily medicated days ran together. Little was accomplished as sleep overtook everything, and any distraction or diversions that might have been possible, well, I left them with the lucidity I’d lost.
While mornings remained full of therapy, med carts, and social workers, the afternoons just dragged on peppered by bad TV, naps staff didn’t want me to take, and an odd one-upmanship between patients in the day room of who could tell the craziest story about what had brought them to the hospital. Interaction with other patients was thought to be therapeutic, healing even, but we each just ranked ourselves on the spectrum of functioning and placed bets on who would get out first. The goal was to get a pass, since that was a precursor to getting out, a short experiment in re-integration. One woman, on getting one, danced around singing, “I’m gonna shake my ass out on pass!” My family visited from NJ, and I saw them as embarrassed as they were confused. Awkward hugs and slaps on the back that felt like punches were shared. The consensus was that one apple had indeed fallen very far from the tree. They were very concerned, very caring, and very normal.
Dr. G thought I exaggerated my deficiencies and that I blew the idea that I was darkness embodied way out of proportion. I wouldn’t have to replace the gargoyles in my office with flowers, but I would have to sand away the reckless, amoral individualism that brought me here. As my edges dulled, the idea that I could take care of myself on my own, the idea that brought me to the hospital in the first place, had to be exorcised before I could be released. I was no longer the master of my own fate. I would need a lot of help for a very long time.
The doctor kept asking questions, but my answers would only confuse. He searched for easy answers when there were none. Every attempt at explanation just led to more questions and life, pleading to be understood, smoked from the fire of the fuel of my reluctant subconscious. I was assaulted by an illness that attacked not my body, but myself, my soul. He told me the medication would regulate my disease as insulin would stabilize a diabetic. I didn’t believe it. Other diseases would affect organs or systems of the body. Mental illness attached itself to who I was and drove me away from joy and love. Despite the searing light in the ward, sickness darkened everything. My sense of relevance and proportion had vanished. The smallest distress, the tiniest disruption, could bring on the full force of depression’s weight. I totally and completely hurt. But I resigned myself to living with it and no longer wanted to die, so the transition out of the hospital had to begin, because, for the insurance company, my just not wanting to die was enough for it to stop paying the bill.
Eventually I did get a pass, and I spent the day awkwardly with Debra, shrugging and squinting from the sun. I wanted to sit before the long cold fireplace in our rented house, or just lay in our bed alone, and I took some better clothes when I returned to the hospital a few hours later. Another pass soon followed and then, after about two weeks, bereft of all constructive thoughts, purged of the best of me, lamenting the worst, I was discharged.
Wanting to live was difficult. Sometime before, I thought there were causes larger than myself, things to live for: God, country, freedom. People found shelter in each of them. But now I stewed without liberty in the lonely prison of individuality, the false promise of equality, the lie of control. I’d sit in the living room and drop the disk with Daniel Lanois’ “White Mustang II” into the CD tray and repeat the song over and over again for hours. Other days I could spend every moment with only the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 pounding in my head. Nothing inside but the pulsing line of music, repeating: No food, no sleep, no me, leaving it only to carve great circles on rollerblades in The Shrine’s parking lot.
What awaited me when, a few weeks later, I returned to work was a clear calendar and a phone that never rang. The executives were kind, but it was obvious I was not to be included in anything at all. The pest from HR told me my duties and responsibilities had been reassigned so as to give me time to heal. Responsibilities could return later, after I’d worked out what I needed to work out. I had a job and nothing to do, no way to distract myself. People talked, and I started to take personal items home. My accomplishments were done, laid out before me on an empty desk, and the great, unspoken, “what happened?” was held over my head. No one peaked their head into my office to even say hello, as if I were contagious and the cholera flag hung limp outside my door. Staff would wonder why I just disappeared as I came in less and less often, and soon no one even noticed when I wasn’t there. Instead of long meetings I took long walks, and no ideas fired in my head. It was good no one was listening, because I had nothing to say.
Dr. G counseled a longer leave, but I just heard leave. Without thinking about the loss of health insurance or the consequences of a big hole in my resume, I negotiated a small package and was gone. I don’t think I talked to any of the people who had worked for me as I faded from the corporate world like the ghosts I had been seeing faded from the ether around me. Empty suits hung in my closet and my bank account held a fixed amount that would have to be enough.
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I left World Access and, shortly after, eager to kill all that held me stable, I left Debra. One day I asked her to sit on the bed. Icily, I said, “For eight years I have done everything you wanted to do. Now I’m going to do something I want to do.” She asked what that was. “Leave you,” I said. But I had nowhere to go so I rented an apartment in a carriage house on a large estate in Richmond. All the leaving was so sudden, and without explanation. I was gone and no one knew to where or why.
I re-emerged to date a woman who was a manager at World Access, and told her my story. She wanted to run away but stayed, and I felt a sense of pity and cruelty as I meant to cause her pain. I began dating her secretary, taunting her, and when she moved to break things off I cryptically and dangerously told her that I knew where her mother lived. She contacted Dr G and said I was a threat to her and sought his support for a restraining order against me, but he passed it off as a woman scorned seeking revenge. The contact was enough, though, and I left her alone. I continued to date the secretary for a time, even took my father to her house for dinner in an effort to feign normalcy, until I grew so numb that I felt nothing and couldn’t bother raising the desire to get to the car to drive to her house.
Autumn came and leaves from maples tumbled down the grass median strip of Monument Avenue like flames on the heals of the dogs which ran unleashed about their owners. The top third of each tree glowed with the intensity of burning youth feeding on the fuel of the deadened branches below. Everything about me was a metaphor for my disease, and everything about me was dying. As the year wore on and I drifted, I realized I needed work, if only for the routine and the effort of being productive. Walking around was getting me little in health or money, and I thought a job, no matter how small, would help. There was a housewares shop in Carytown called Lane Samson where I had bought a number of art pieces. I spoke to the owner, and told her I needed work. She laughed, she thought I was kidding, but I convinced her I was serious. I couldn’t work the sales floor, as socially I was too damaged and too shy, so she gave me a job in the stockroom tying price tags to items as they were shipped in to stock for the Christmas Season. I stayed for a few months and saw the job as a sort of penance for my overspending, and I sought some sense of value, but I was barren of ideas and beliefs and did little to improve myself or my situation.
There was a girl named Cara, a dancer whose hair covered one eye and who’s full lips barely smiled, who worked at a coffee shop down the street from the shop where I worked, and we began brief, tortured conversations, both of us ravaged by depression. I had been a long time without ideas, and she started me thinking. I still read, but I began to fill my time haunting Hollywood Cemetery, not considering the lives interred, but instead the monuments above them. Sitting among the markers I began to write descriptions of emotions as if painting with words; the literary equivalent of lying on the ground imagining animals in the shapes of clouds. I’d stare for hours at the woman carved on the Kerr grave and the tomb became my inspiration. It lit a small fire in me and inspired me to lift above my lack of effort to even live, for I had nothing to live for but the love of a statue.
Into this space stepped Cara. I visited her every once in a while and we finally made love. She turned her focus on me and I fell into her despair, as if only I could light the night she stumbled through. Before long she smiled. She introduced me to CS Lewis, who made me consider religion again as more than just symbols and soul-searching, and ideas that had failed me long ago began to return. Never before had I met a person who was as close as Cara was to the dark night I read about in St John of the Cross. Never before had love seemed so spiritual, as if rapture was possible. She clung to me and pulled me deep into the darkness from which she was unlikely to escape, and in the deepest moments of passion I felt equally doomed.
I found myself giving up everything to be with her, and felt her, whether she truly was or I was projecting again, demanding more. I was so close to raw mysticism, so sacred, so scared, that I surely erected in her a myth I could complete; a martyr I could save; a method I could apply to save myself. Only myself. We made love in the cemetery and died a little death. She represented in me something I had to sacrifice in order to escape the prison of dark thought and tempting God that had taken hold of me. What blurred was who needed whom the most: She and I, or my soul and God. All the ideas of selfishness and personal accomplishment that were incinerated as I lost my mind drew up for one last assault on my ideas of faith. God had taken a position against me, and Cara stood in the way of the fight.
She kept calling me back, pulling me in, until the night I had a ticket to see Sky Cries Mary at the Flood Zone and wanted to go, but she begged me to stay with her in her apartment. I held her until she fell asleep, than slipped out for one last song. I snuck into the cemetery and slept on the Kerr grave, imagining me bound to the seraph on the tomb, left one climax from joining the void that beckoned and repulsed my hold on the physical world. I was hallucinating again, and blamed Cara. Only without her depth of spirit, only without her touch, could I rejoin a world without witches and spirits drifting off as wisps of fog up the gentle hills of the cemetery; the smoke rising from her cigarette in her palm-up, outstretched hand. Souls going home. To be free of it all I had to end something. Something had to join the ranks of names in the cemetery. I drove Cara to a place by the James where I could smash against the rocks the chains that bound us to each other and to this world. Cars drove down the hill behind us in a broad curve. Their headlights swept out across the water as if beams from a lighthouse. The late July heat panted a hot breeze and gave me chills on the back of my neck. She said her horoscope told her to be wary. She was being lied to. I told her I had become able to deal with her only in open spaces, and her orphic scent around me brought the decaying visions marching back from the graves. Our love was a field of flowers that simply looked better from the distance, and here, among the weeds and thorns, I felt compelled to join the river and drift far from the Kerr grave and the dried-out grass on the south facing hills. I couldn’t… I didn’t want to hurt her. She wept silently as I drove her home, and I sat in the car as she stood before the door to her building fumbling in her purse for her keys. I had seen her as so graceful. She looked up. Hair fell from her face as the fury of her hands located the key ring. She could not get inside fast enough. I watched the outline of her body beneath her sheer dress sway toward the light at the top of the stairs, and she was gone.
I sat at a red light and watched a shopping bag ripped under by passing cars. The light changed and I reached behind the passenger seat for a CD to listen to. As I lifted the disc toward the deck the gentle tug of a hair, one of hers, caught my wrist and snapped. I pushed my hand into the air that rushed past the open window. The hair clung for a moment to my fingers, then slipped away. All at once I felt quickly pulled back into the material world, and quickly forgot about God – and stopped hallucinating.
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The COBRA law enabled me to purchase health insurance from World Access for 18 months, but as that time raced by I needed a job with benefits. I was seeing Dr G often, and taking a few expensive medications. In the West End of Richmond, near where I practiced Kendo, a Starbucks had opened and I learned they offered full benefits to part-time employees. I couldn’t do much in my state, but I could make espresso and operate a cash register.
Soon my personality was back. My shifts became a bit of a performance as I traded barbs with the businessmen and flirted with the ladies on their way to exercise class. Other baristas were amazed. I could say anything to anybody, and no one ever took offence. I bubbled with energy and charisma, and people laughed out loud at my jokes. I was most astounded that the ladies who lunched would date a man with absolutely no prospects, for at this point I moved into a room in a hairdresser’s house, the carriage house gone with a good portion of my savings.
With no desire or ability to reconnect with old acquaintances, I made a couple of good friendships with a couple of co-workers at the coffee shop. Other than the doctor, there had really been no one to talk to. Not wanting to cede all meaningful conversation completely to a psychiatrist, I made friends for the first time in years.
And so I stabilized, not completely well, but well enough to begin to open up to people and ideas, and well-off enough to begin to save again. At only 32 I took on an aura of the sage who knew more than his years could allow, and for a time left my political and economic passions behind me. I think I actually enjoyed that life – making coffee, dating without falling in love, living small. I stopped trying to impress Dr G and cut back on therapy, sure that I was well again. Beneath all this, though, I was afraid. I’d seen a very dark side to the high life I lived and I passed with the showy 80s and early 90s into a more subtle, cautious maturity. For the first time in my life I really didn’t want anything, and that may have been true satisfaction or choking, having bitten off more than I could chew. Perhaps my living for the moment was just a means of avoiding getting along; avoiding dealing with what I discarded to just live and be present without responsibility. If I stayed in the moment I wouldn’t have to worry about anything or anybody. I was selfish still, and I settled into a life unencumbered, unwilling to plan or even reflect, not truly present, actually, just there. The mental illness was too sudden and too complete to have taught any ponderable lessons. I was different, that was all. I wanted little and my curiosity felt quenched. Behind this lightness a nagging voice whispered that I was barely living at all.
I thought that years later I’d look back on this time as an aberration. I’d be back to form and vital again, albeit more cautious of my wandering moods and more tolerant of others’ need to be different. It snowed a lot that winter, and a friend, a photographer, took pictures of me serving two customers at a table outside, snow up to our knees. Richmond ground to a standstill, not used to the carpet of white that covered the roads and exaggerated the size of the confederate generals statues’ shoulders. And soon, as happens in cities, the snow was dirty and clumped up, walked or driven on everywhere, and winter was no longer beautiful but a bother. An incendiary burst of starlings lifted from an old walnut. The shape of the mass twirled, expanded, fell back, and dispersed. Toward a sky of factory gray the column ascended; a drop of mercury that split and rejoined as it tumbled south. Spring never comes in time, and the magnolias drooped with frozen leaves and brittle branches as the sun set with no trace of color.