When I’m afraid, I lose my mind. It’s fine, it happens all the time. As I look up into the blanket, I see the ceiling of the Sagrada Familia before ambien bludgeons me to sleep. Another morning here. One of the nurses wakes me up, I politely ask to opt out of group discussion, as I have every time. For the rest of the day my fingers trace the pages of a grubby blue Bible, along lines of Revelations and Ecclesiastes. Today they’re letting us spend a little bit of time outside. No one’s allowed any cigarettes except for the workers. My eyes wander up from the pebbles that make up the walkway to a wooden fence, covered in a mural of a tree with handprints for leaves. This is my first time in a mental hospital.
A few days before, I had my most severe nervous breakdown. It was at my fourth or fifth job, just as shitty as the rest. Delivery driving. I stepped into my manager’s office to eyeball the schedule, looking for my next day off, and I couldn’t find it. They scheduled me to work 9 days in a row. The thought of it rose in me like carcinogenic bile. My eyes narrowed and I walked myself over to the dish pit. I started to cry. And cry. On the floor, curled up into a ball. Two of my coworkers noticed and tried to get me to stand back up. When I got back home, my mother drove me to the crisis unit of her old job. They diagnosed me with non-descript bi-polar disorder. Years earlier it was melancholic depression. Every morning the nurses made me take lithium. Before that, I was on an SSRI.
I’m sitting in the office of a social worker. My mom looks at me with a ghastly expression, tears welled in her eyes, as I show her my first self-harm scars, the blood is still scabbed. My parents had recently divorced and she started to notice it was having an effect on me, so, she made the appointments for me to regularly talk to a counselor downtown. I only attended one group meeting, talking with kids my age. One of them described a home invasion he did with a gang he was in. I was curious about the details, but didn’t want to seem like I was judging him. After all, my brain was cooked. That was the only time we met.
The engine of the bus purrs as another student gets picked up for school. Out of the window, I can see a wooden fence and the open expanse of another grass field. Cows are out today. You’ve been with me through it all. From Arizona Iced Out to Agony. From the public school to a public life of work. Filling my head from earbuds, pouring out from speakers. Today, on this bus, I listen to Unknown Death 2002. Tomorrow, on the verge of another complete collapse, Stranger and Warlord.