Within Sterile Walls
For so long I could still see the hospital from my dorm room. With its concrete structure perforating the landscape as an incessant reminder. The windows that crawled up its sides like ants, with each one seemingly whispering to me, and I’m repulsed. I can always feel the visceral response welling in my body when I see it, somewhere between comical and infuriating. Now in the mornings its form haunts me, and in the evening when I close the curtains, it still manages to live in the dark and silent room. It swallows tranquility, spitting back up a mocking tar like mass that attaches itself to my skin.
Each year that passes gives me the illusion that its form will detach, dropping to the floor as dead weight. The dream that the building’s architecture isn’t bloody and carved on the back of my eyelids is constantly lingering. Or where its hallways don’t line my mind, doorways shut, locked, and entrapping. Although its implications no longer loom over me in the way they once had, its story is still burned into my skin. My body has grown over the place in which it lives, as only a pink distinguished scar. With the passage of time, it’s sunk deeper into my memories, and I can feel myself forgetting what once was. I have to force myself to remember, as if it’s an obsession. Reliving the shame that spread through my body exactly as it happened, and the way my lungs drowned in terror. I couldn’t speak. I only saw as blood pooled at the beds of my fingers, and scratches squirmed across my arms like wriggling maggots. This memory is only fading into static, and I worry if I let enough time of comfort pass, it will be like it never even happened.
When I moved into a new dorm in the fall, and the air was a little too warm for my body, I learned to bury the atmosphere. I wrapped the room in the people I wanted to be, and who I didn’t feel like I was, yet it managed to intrude. Though I hid its presence behind girly frills, ones that felt unnatural as I feigned femininity, there was always a reminder. Concrete poked through posters and photos, a shadow over their bright images, and bright fluorescent lights tried to invade my own, soft and warm. I was desperate to bring life and love to the place that felt so dark in my heart. Even though I’m in a different building, it still shades the sun with despair. It’s stuck to me, sewn to my skin like a badge, or a mass expanding into the pits of my stomach. My history is alive within me, eating away at the space my body takes up.
I’ve spent so much time thinking, but it often occurs when I’m vulnerable: heartbroken, depressed, throwing up. This notion has always managed to hold true. In the spring, humid air fills my living space and I feel the familiarity of melancholy once more. The sky is nearly cloudless above, yet between me and its grace is a bathroom ceiling. The tile under my feet presses through the soles of my shoes, pulling me back down, and the pressure pushing from above reinforces it. My arms rest cold against the porcelain almost glued in place, with my eyes craned in focus. Every now and then a drop of water lands next to the shower drain echoing through the silence and interrupting my slurry of thoughts. My mind is focused on a pit growing in my stomach, its roots penetrating through acid and organ into every crevice. It’s only expanding inside of me, like a parasite leeching off of my nutrients and life. With bile rising and pressing into my throat, I gag into the bowl, almost out of hope.
My body is frozen to the ground, with ice welding my joints into position. It’s still early in the morning and my class has already started. I can’t help but picture the empty seat that breaks up the row of students, and the way my professor paces across the room, his humor booming through the space. The more I think about it, the more I feel myself silently mourning the loss of my education, yet there’s nothing I can do. With fluorescent lights boring into my skull, I’m overwhelmed with dread and anticipation. At the time I’m not thinking about the history that will devour me – yet I know it will come back – but rather I’m thinking of the present that’s pushing me back into a place of darkness. My mind is at odds with itself, and so is my body. Like I’m fighting, perhaps a virus or even myself, all I can do is writhe and contort.
At some point the only thing I can do is lead my lifeless body to the other room, where she can die on a cotton covered rock. My back presses against its flat surface, and my mind drifts to and from my discomfort. Lying in that bed I can feel its eyes on my body, with every window penetrating my skin I can’t help but remember the day I got back. It was a different blanket, mattress, and view out the window, but it still feels the same. A year ago, in the early spring, tears sat heavy on my face. The irony that was living in my gut, then and now, was almost trying to bubble out. But any sense of life or placidity was released, and the world was dense on my chest. Everything was being experienced in the extremes, and my consciousness felt like it was grieving the loss of normality.
I laid there on that day last spring for an eternity, my face pressed itself into the plush blankets to smother any noise or breath I made. At the time I was unsure if it was because I wanted to die, or because I wanted to live, but I guess I have my answer. My roommate wasn’t there, she never was, but I was still worried someone would know. That someone had seen the officers escorting me out of the building, or through the window of the cop car. I wonder now if this was more terrifying than actually being there. The sound of their voices creeping down my neck, full of lies and secrets. The crack in my mothers voice and the tear that would then roll down my cheek. One hundred miles away and yet she was by my side as her words bounced down from satellites above. It was all eerie, everything was happening and I had yet to process the first moment; every sound, every event, they were all simultaneous.
Colliding with the present, something was coming alive around me, swallowing my body in murky waters. I was marooned on a bed after the fact, with agony splashing from the wall to my feet, my neck, my mouth. Filling my lungs with filth, sharp against my throat and cutting all the way down. Splitting me apart from the inside, my eyes could only close to hide from the bile ridden sea. I was alive, yet in that moment I was drifting into what was something beyond this plane. I realize now it was a despondent sleep, but at the time it felt like death.
When I’m reminded of this memory, any of it, I can’t help but look back at it from the lens of another. It didn’t seem like me who spent time alone in that infantilizing plastic chair, and then surrounded by strangers in a hospital room. It’s not that I don’t remember the painful details, just that I don’t fully identify with the girl in the blue paper scrubs. She was curled up in the confines of pale plastic, cold against her skin and anchored into the floor by a set of bolts. The late-night, early-morning, news played in the background over her thoughts – my thoughts – and the clock ticked towards one.
I felt exposed, as if everyone could see through the paper, and I couldn’t help but think of it as a barrier that was all too weak. The background was like static, and I let my skin melt into a malleable blob for the orderlies to move around, hoping that if I did so, they would tell me what was happening. Back and forth they walked, and I followed them with my eyes. Their real cloth coverings, shoes on their feet, it all felt distant now. With the passage of time I began to trace the room in circles, my mind moving in a spiral, loop after loop. I tried to etch the setting in my brain. It was as if I knew I would begin to forget one day, as if I would be sad to not remember the thoughts that crawled through my mind like parasites, and the feeling that the world was collapsing in.
Only three months prior had I turned eighteen, and now everyone around me was twice my age. It made me forget that I had become an adult. I was trusted, I was responsible, yet I was also a young child, now with naivety and stupidity trickling out of her body in the form of small tears running down her cheek. Whose cuticles bled crimson with anxiety, and whose mind tried to distinguish itself from the situation. It was all an accident, and in that I could see the situation bleed too with irony.
I was never alone, with every second that passed I was accompanied, and paranoia slowly crept in. The light outside the window flickered, my companions whispered, and I couldn’t help but think they could read my mind. The words I had to say, that would sting so harshly against my tongue if I even dared, now lived in my mind as thoughts and anger. I so badly wanted to know if they were being projected into the room, bouncing off the vacant walls and into their eager ears. Did they know I was a coward, did they know I was afraid? Maybe even afraid of them. Would they treat me differently if they knew? I couldn’t help but imagine them confronting me after hearing everything, and picture the blood that could pool at the base of the bed.
I would sleep so much under those thin covers, but I was woken up by myself and others with great frequency. The thought of closing my eyes made my skin crawl, and my mind immediately pictured my death, yet I did it anyways. The image of my body, pale and lifeless, was pressing itself into the forefront of my brain as I fell asleep. I thought of every scenario, bloody and violent, to understand the future that was awaiting me. It was all in my imagination, yet I was becoming convinced it was the only way I would leave. I had no idea when I would be released, and was desperate to know if I would be at all. I was promised that I would be there briefly, but I had been promised so much. My lungs were overflowing with broken promises, and they were drowning me in their reassurance and false kindness.
When lying on the plastic covered mattress, fiberless and tough, I found myself listening. It was all I could do to keep my mind at bay – although it still twisted into knots. With my head on a folded blanket, a pillow nowhere in sight, I listened to them speak. I tried to hide my own thoughts with their words and it was as if, if I focused hard enough on what they were saying, they wouldn’t hear words that were passing through my mind, riddled with fear and torment.
I so desperately wanted to know what their lives were like so that I didn’t have to live my own. They were acquainted with the building which we were in, and the system I was now joining. I didn’t know it at the time, but being released wasn’t the end of my experience with the hospital. Rather, I would find myself in the on campus counselors, crying in one of the dozens of lifeless offices. With bright light beating on my face, the mascara stained tears would stream down my face and a serious tone would float through the air. I don’t really know its source, just that it exists in my memory as a catalyst for my anger. It told me to consider therapy for depression, without realizing it and the system were the cause. I wasn’t despondent because I was still depressed, but because of how I was forced into an unimaginable horror that was now being repeated with every required session.
I didn’t know this at the time, only that what would transpire would be ingrained into my mind, and that when I got back I would think about it frequently. I would think about them frequently, those I had been so fearful of, wondering what they were doing and begging to know how they were. I had listened to their thoughts, the disordered eating, transference to another hospital, I want to know now if their experience had helped them. I want to know if their fire had been extinguished as mine had, almost as reassurance there could be more than evil lurking behind the concrete walls.
Now I was back and thinking about them again, in my bed and in pain. It all felt like an amalgamation of all the identical days I’ve lived before, so eerily similar. For months I had felt dejection and loneliness hanging over me, although I was the most outgoing I had been. My body welled with irony, pulling me back into some place below my body, beyond the mattress but perhaps not somewhere so dark. I was surrounded by love in its every form, yet I was still alone.
There was humor in my thoughts, although fixated on the time I spent, the situation was becoming an amusing story I longed to remember to the fullest extent. How one mistake had brought me so far, and how it took that one mistake to get help I had needed so desperately in my past, yet had needed no longer. A reminder of the evening I spent crying and looking up inpatient treatments in highschool, when I feared for my life. It was so vivid in my mind, and so was the fact that only at my happiest did I receive that attention or service that I had craved so deeply. Then, when I got it, it was nothing more than a catalyst for desolation and bitterness. It wasn’t a time spent receiving care or sympathy for my presence, but rather filled with voices that floated through the air with the purpose of shame and belittlement. They told me how stupid and naive I was. How I should be humiliated and mortified by my words that were everything but serious. Each sentence was filled with the desire for me to understand that I was unintelligent and dimwitted. Only after I got back though, did I realize it worked.
Historically, I’ve used writing to tell stories that are deeply personal in order to fill the pit that was left behind. When I wrote this memoir, it was more than second nature. The words on the page are as they appeared in my mind, however their purpose shifted over time.
My ‘first draft’ told a story that was far different from the finished product. It started as a fictional tale, merely inspired by my own experiences, something I could write to process my emotions while simultaneously not being associated with my history. Although I wrote this iteration to its entirety, it was ingenuine and not a true reflection of what I saw in my mind. In creating this ‘final draft’, which will never truly be final, I had to confront my biggest fear: that others would see my experience as one that wasn’t enough. I wasn’t there long enough, I didn’t hurt hard enough, and subsequently my feelings were too much. It took experiencing the memoir writing process to not feel embarrassed by my memories, and to validate my subsequent emotions. The words drastically shifted from something that was a separate entity from myself, to a retelling with the intention to show solidarity with a particular audience: those affected by the mental healthcare system
Since I was young I always knew what I wanted to do – I just didn’t know that I could do it. Not just because I lacked knowledge of my options, but because of the behavior towards my pursuing the field. In high school I was told there was no point for me to take the class, that I was meant for the humanities. While it’s true that I’m creative and passionate about art, nothing compares to my love for physics.
It’s too difficult, there’s too few women, there’s no point. Yet, I remember being a child thinking this was the path I would do because of my father. Only for my mind to be changed for years until the opportunity truly presented itself. What only worsened this was my history with my mental health. It all feels so distant now, yet it’s impact remains.
The reason I say this is because the story I told made me question everything I know about myself. It made me question the path I was on and my pursuit of education. To me, this is the perceivable impact of the mental health system. That while it has the ability to help, it also has the ability to harm, and that to an outside perspective, sometimes the effect is indistinguishable.
Madwomen in the Attic 
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