BRIGID HANNON

Fancy Doctor

I’m spiraling and my mother made me

See a strange woman with a spiteful stare

And I used big words like

Trick-o-till-o-mania and she laughs…

She thinks I make things up.

I think she isn’t worth the frame holding the degree on her wall.

I’m spiraling and my mother made me

See several fancy doctors in several days.

I tell my story over and over,

They give me tiny pills in rainbows of color,

For morning, for noon, for night…

I am numbed by these fancy drug dealers.

I’m spiraling and my mother made me

See a counselor at a clinic.

Like a life raft I clung to her,

Like a savior I worshiped her

I was believed and I was healing, and now

I don’t need your fancy doctor,

Or your fancy degree.

 

Thursday

Thursday night and I’m stoned

Because sometimes adults are babies,

And I need to push this feeling away.

It’s exactly what my doctor would object to,

But he discontinued my Xanax,

So what does he expect?

I’d rather be stoned

Than a month of anxiety

In return for big Pharmas

Pill-of-the-month club’s

new hit single.

I’ll risk life and limb and bank account

For a moment of sanity

That I can feel but they need backed

by decades of medical research.

 

I don’t need that.

I know what I feel.

 

If this were one of the apocalypse movies I love so much

I know they’d kill me first.

Survival of the fittest and I’ve been sick since sixteen

sucking Lilly’s tit in a Forest of Pharmaceuticals.

At twenty-two I smoke a joint in a motel room,

that anxiety melts away for the first time in a decade-

It’s so delicious I can’t believe it.

It can’t be that easy.

 

And really on my own I’m a better writer than a person,

But with those little piles of pills

I sacrifice one for the other,

secretly still dreaming of my lost and recluse life.

 

Anxious

It’s 2:34am and I

Am trying to sleep but it’s Tuesday

Which means I have to work at four and see my therapist

At nine.

And what if I am late

And what if I am sick

And what if I can’t get out of bed in the morning,

If I throw up I’ll need at least an hour to recover…

My husband will be worried if I get too sick-

I don’t want to trouble him when he has to work and

If I do have to go to the hospital I guess I could Uber or

Call an ambulance again but

I don’t want to bother them

I don’t want to be sick in the first place and

I have to relax like my therapist says.

It’s half in your mind,

It’s mostly anxiety,

Its not your fault your brain misfires.

Or am I some special person that

Needs to think thirteen steps ahead of the situation?

Am I gifted with the ability to control the outcome

To change the future

To avoid the badness

The sadness

The deep dark depths of pain we dredge up in the middle of the night?

The reminders of times we limped away broken, hurting and in tears?

I’m trying to sleep but it’s Tuesday

And it’s…2:35am.

 

Dry Eyes

Her smile is stale,

pasted on a face well weathered.

Her stare fixed on a distant point-

She is faking it.

Inside she is screaming,

reliving her worst days

as she tries to reconcile the past to

the future.

She is trapped in a prison she built herself,

more afraid of the outside with each passing year.

Her bones shake like scaffolding,

trembling in stiff winds.

She cannot cry anymore.

Her heart is full of holes,

but she hides them behind

those garish grins and blank stares.

 

I’m asked to write a statement about mental health.  But where does one begin?  With youth, when what was mental illness masqueraded as personality, until one day my emotions overflowed and washed out that temperament as well?  Later, when doctors called me a liar and medicated me into a zombie who couldn’t think for herself?  Now, while I struggle to have my healthcare regulated in a way that benefits me, even if it’s not what’s necessarily suggested by the clinic I attend?  I can start in none of these places, because my mental health has been a key issue in my life for longer than I can remember.  When I discovered MITA, I was interested to learn of a group in my area that was advocating for women in regards mental health.  I am a firm believer that each person needs to find the treatment that works for them specifically, not just action that has been backed by Big Pharma researchers and dealt to us with a “one size fits all” mentality.

I’m asked to write a statement about mental health.  My statement is that I hope we all soon live in a world where the psychiatric industry is fully open with its patients, and able to heal a person with methods that apply to them personally.  I hope that you find what works for you, and then do it.  We are all capable of great things.

Brigid Hannon is a writer and caregiver from Buffalo, NY.  She has been writing since childhood, and has only recently begun sorting through her work and looking for pieces for possible publication.  Most recently she has been featured in the August edition of Ghost City Press Review and the November issue of Street Light Press. She can be found online at her blog https://hamneggs716.wordpress.com and on Twitter @stagequeen.