The Saddest of the Sad
12 Dec 2011 15 Comments
in Survival Tags: change, hope, hospital, music, the life of erin
It hurts. It hurts a lot. Unlike physical pain, emotional pain always feels the same to me once it reaches a certain intensity. It’s the heartache that feels woven into the muscles pumping blood through my heart, both sustaining and destroying me.
I spend so much time fighting my pain every day that I get exhausted. By four o’clock today I couldn’t fight it anymore so I put on my “Saddest of the Sad” playlist. It’s my longest playlist, with ninety-seven songs. Every sad song I’ve connected with. I curled up on the couch and listened to the songs on shuffle. The Velvet Underground turned to the Smiths, on to Wilco, bands that I still listen to on a regular basis.
Then came Silverchair’s Suicidal Dream and Hurt by Nine Inch Nails (both triggering, so no links from me but look them up if you are feeling safe and want to). Throw in some Jack off Jill and it made me remember my first year in and out of the hospital, when I realized that my pain was an illness that my therapists thought they knew. And they didn’t know it, they had no idea what MY pain felt like, but those musicians understood. Our Lady Peace helped me hang on with the lyrics, ““
Still on shuffle, my iPod played Sarah McLaughlan and I remembered my pain when I thought it was only grief over deaths in my family. Sarah McLaughlan’s voice was my first comfort and I’d forgotten how soothing her voice is. made me remember how I felt after my friend Darlene committed suicide. The guilt I had, the fear and pain of being stuck in a life I didn’t want but knew I could not give up.
reminded me of bringing up Donnie Darko in a writing class I took. I tested the waters to see if there was anyone in the room like me but the only response I got was nervous laughter at the darkness of my poetry.
Third Eye Blind, Azure Ray, the Cure, Bird York, Radiohead…these bands know my pain better than I do. The songs on shuffle made me jump back and forth as far back as my first interest in music. It’s no coincidence that we turn to music as we become teenagers.
My pain feels too familiar for me to cope with sometimes but when I look back through my years of suffering I realize that although the pain hasn’t lessened very much, I have survived a lot of it. Slowly, song by song, step by step I learned how to keep going even though I had no end in sight. I really don’t know how much “better” I am but my collection of music is teaches me that I am learning more and more about myself as I continue through this fucked up life. Experience is growth, even if that growth doesn’t give you any distance from pain.
Think about how many new bands emerge each year, how many albums are released. With free music downloads widely accessible, there’s no way we have to go through our pain alone. Find a voice that connects to yours and when you lose your voice, listen to that other voice until you grow strong again. Which music helps you connect with your feelings?
We Aren’t Broken
06 Nov 2011 6 Comments
in The Big Picture Tags: coping, depression, fear, hospital, psychiatry, therapy, tips, writing
We can FEEL broken, flawed, or even crazy but it does not mean that we ARE those things.
For a while there I felt like the diagnosis of being mentally ill meant that there was something wrong with ME. I thought that I’d screwed up and failed at life. In reality, there was something wrong with the chemical balances in my brain. There was something wrong with my coping methods to deal with stress. There was nothing wrong with me as a person.
It’s super important to get help when you are depressed or are having trouble functioning in everyday life. You might see a counselor or a therapist or a psychiatrist, and they are trained to help you in the ways that they know how. Trust them, work with them. But guess what? You still have a hand in your recovery.
I’m going to let you in on a secret: YOU are the expert on yourself and your life. So even though people helping you with your illness are great, they can’t help you 100% because they don’t know you 100%. You are the only person who does.
This means two things. The first one is that everything your doctor or therapist or even your friend recommends for you to do to help yourself has to feel right for you. If it doesn’t, tell them. Ask for clarification about why they think it would help and if you still don’t agree, then say no. There will be times when your treatment team can still do things even when you say no, like if they think you are going to harm yourself or someone else, but most of the time they have to listen to you.
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First Impressions of a Psych Ward
14 Sep 2011 14 Comments
in Psych Ward, The Mental Health System Tags: admission, friendship, hospital, overdose, self harm, suicide
My first impressions of the London Ontario psych ward were nightmarish. A nurse had led me to an elevator taking me from the ER up to the seventh floor of Victoria Hospital (everyone just called it South Street Hospital). She handed me off to another nurse who lead me through a dark hallway carpeted in an ugly puke brown. I gazed in horror at the people around me:
A ragged man standing outside the nurses’ station, leering at me over his cane. He was missing a finger.
An old woman, thin and bewildered, clutching at her robe around her thin frame, shaking. Her eyes were like saucers.
A young girl behind me in the A.C.U. (Acute Care Unit) pressed her face against the glass, breathing heavily until she fogged up the window, encircling her head like a ghost.
It was a relief to be led into a small room and have the door shut behind me. The first nurse passed me on to a second, who sat me down and took my temperature, pulse, and weighed me. “So, what brought you here today?”
I sighed. I’d been asked this about six times already by different people in the E.R. Didn’t any of the staff talk to each other?
“I was sent to the E.R. after talking to a psychologist at my school.”
“Did you express desires to hurt yourself?”
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Incompetency in the ER
15 Aug 2011 7 Comments
in Emergency, The Mental Health System Tags: ER, hospital, self-injury
When I finish a journal I usually flip back through the entries to reflect on what I’ve been through since I started writing in it. Last night I came across an entry I’d written after leaving the ER one night. It was by far one of my worst experiences there.
In this instance from February 2010, I had gone to the ER alone, stated that my injury was “self-inflicted” and then waited for about three hours to be seen. A nurse finally came out of the swinging doors and loudly called my name. I gathered up my books and journal and followed him to a bed in a small room of three beds. The bed was folded in two so that it was like a big cushy chair. Two other people sat in the two chair-beds next to mine with a thin curtain separating each space.
The nurse was probably 35 and he gestured to my arm, “Did you do this to end your life?” When I told him no he asked whether I’d do it again if I was sent home. I said no. I could tell he was uneasy; he wouldn’t even look at my arm. I started to cry and he handed me a small Kleenex box and walked away.
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Language of the Uncomfortable
04 Jul 2011 8 Comments
in The Mental Health System Tags: activism, crazy, hospital, quotes, reality, stigma
After my recent post titled “The Noonday Demon,” a friend told me it was no longer politically correct to use the term “Third World Country.” Upon doing some research, I learned the alternative phrase some people are now using is “undeveloped.” While the terms of “First World Country” to “Fourth World Country” initially came about to classify political world views during the cold war, it eventually became misunderstood as people thought it was a ranking of the best to the worst. I meant it in this context:
“Despite ever evolving definitions, the concept of the third world serves to identify countries that suffer from high infant mortality, low economic development, high levels of poverty, low utilization of natural resources, and heavy dependence on industrialized nations.”
I encourage you to view the source of that quote here, a site that explores the root of that language and its future. It’s quite interesting!
I am glad that my friend brought the issue of terminology up not only because I love grammar and the evolution of language, but because this is a perfect segue to examining the language used to speak of mental illness. And holy shit, is there ever a ton to talk about there. People tend to rename things that make them uncomfortable, and talking mental illness certainly makes people uncomfortable!
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