Safety

It's 2019 and I am safe at home. The air is quiet, still, peaceful. My home is mostly orderly. I see my things where I expect them to be. I have a closet with my own clothes. I have food in my refrigerator. There is a lock on the door, and no one will come in that I don't invite. It's just me and the pup. It's night. We are alone, but we are safe. We are free from harm, from anyone yelling at us. I have agency. I come and go when I please. I have a schedule I made. I sleep and wake. I work, I play, I watch tv. The ground is firm, reality is secure. I am free.

2004, Day 2 in the Hospital

This is the first time waking up with a needle stuck into my arm. I am coming out of a deep, deep haze. I don't quite know where I am, and there is that disorienting feeling of not being sure exactly how I got there. They were taking my blood for tests and doing vitals. I think they did some intake tests, the day before but I don't know what it was. That part was a blur. I do know that one of the tests was likely a drug test. I heard the cops say the day before that they thought my behavior may have been caused by Ecstasy. Hadn't they heard of the concoction of not sleeping, barely eating and working out aggressively while trying to process being homeless? I guess not.

After the tests, they explained that I was in the hospital and told me I had a roommate while I was there. At some point I met doctors, ate breakfast, gave them my parents contact information. I remember staring at myself in the mirror wearing hospital mental wing scrubs while washing my face. I looked so different with my short hair. I wasn't smiling. My face was hard and serious. My eyes were challenging. I was ready to start fighting for myself. I didn't know who my fight was with, but I was finally breaking out of that cycle of homeschooling trappedness to be let loose in the real world. I was ready to play. I felt like I could finally be me. Yet I was surrounded by some odd people and couldn't leave. I was in Hotel California. And when the doctor asked why I was there I told them it was because I fell in love. It sounded like nonesense to them. But I had filled in all the blanks in my head. That love gave me the courage to stand up for myself, it cost me everything, I had no place to live and I was admitting that I hated my parents.

Yet, the doctors called my parents and my parents drove to North Carolina to get me. The doctors said, see they love you, they are here to get you.

To me, they felt like captors, wanting to take me back and lock me in that room, keep me from my future, order me around, invade my time. These were not people who could be entrusted with my care.

Before my parents were there, the doctors told me they were diagnosing me with bipolar II. There may have been some writing about schizo effective episodes or something, mania, or something, depression or something. I'm not really sure. The doctors went into a spiel about how everyone has a spectrum of happy to sad emotions. For most people, their emotional range has, for example a range of 10 levels. The thing is, bipolar individuals have maybe 20. (It's a spectrum so it's not actual numbers), but basically these extreme levels of happy and sad led to irrational and sometimes dangerous behavior. Ergo, I needed to be on drugs for the rest of my life. There was no other way to live. Now take these meds, be quiet and go to your room they said.

My parents heard this diagnosis. They said, sure, our daughter we have known for 20 years must be unstable. Yes, give her these meds. Fix her. They said something was wrong with me because I was angry with them.

I was so angry. Two decades of anger. My mom had yelled at me so many times. Thrown my brothers down the hallways. Threatened so many things. Never letting up. You bet I was mad.

The only way to get out of the hospital was to take meds. So I was given a mood stabilizer, a tranquilizer, and an antipsychotic. Some bouquet of mindlessness. And they released me to the care of my parents.

So, I went back to the haunted house. Their house that was not quiet, not still, not peaceful. Their house with interruptions, doors where locks didn't work, walls that yelling could be heard through. I didn't have a puppy. I was under a roof that wasn't mine.

I never got to pack up my stuff from the camp. Someone did it for me. My parents sped away from North Carolina like I shouldn't have been there. I didn't say goodbye to James, to any of the friends I made there. I have been back to my ground zero but one day I will.