Spring Break

            Spring break, 1998. My freshman year of college. Other girls across campus were going wild, I was going mad.

            Days were getting harder, self-loathing sharpened with each social and academic failure. I couldn't do it. Couldn't get out of bed, couldn't go to class, couldn't even socialize. Feeling inferior to the other students in the dorm, in the school, I walked around with blinders on—when I had to leave my room. Terrified to look up, that someone would notice me and realize I didn't belong there, didn't belong anywhere. My eyes habitually downcast hoping that if I didn't see them—the “big kids”—they wouldn't see me.

            Nothing out of the ordinary happened that day, only the voice in my head grew louder.

            “Cut yourself. Just one slice. Only enough to give you a reason to hurt.”

            Pulling my shower caddy off the shelf in my dorm room, I pried open a pink plastic safety razor, extracted the blade. I dropped my clothes to the floor, wrapped my body in a towel, and walked out of my room and across the hall to the floor's bathroom—shower caddy and rusty blade in hand. I stepped into the white tile shower stall. Letting the hot water run over me, I tried to ignore the persistent nagging in my head. I looked at my left wrist, mapped the green and purple veins down the yellow skin of my forearm. Careful to avoid the highways of life that traveled the distance from elbow to palm, I dug an edge of the cold metal in. I pressed down, not too hard, and dragged the blade another two inches. Blood mixed with water, trickled down my body, tinted my feet. No real damage was done. Just a flesh wound. A cut that bled and stung like my animosity for myself.

            This time, the physical pain didn't ease my emotional anguish. Afraid of what I might do next, feeling smaller than usual, I reached out for help. I called my mom.

            Assuring her the cut wasn't bad wasn't good enough. My mom drove the hour to campus and took me to the hospital, my third trip to Bayfront Medical center in six months. The biggest concern was the rusty blade, so I got a tetanus shot. Then the nurse gave my mom directions to the only mental hospital in the area that had a free bed, somewhere in Pinellas Park. Must have been a rough week for a lot of people.

            I sat with the man at intake when I got to the facility. In that cramped and cluttered office, the stiff-backed wooden chair forced my posture to be erect. His desk was littered with books and papers, and excused his slouch. The man's eyes and face were weary, but his voice smiled with optimism for me. I fought to pay attention, to ignore the man calling out from somewhere in the building.

            “Help me. . . Can you hear me? . . . Is anyone there? . . . Hello?” His cry so slow and eerie, I imagined that was what a newly dead person says to the living. The echo made it impossible to tell which direction the cry was coming from and from how far away.

            “Don't worry about him,” the intake man said. “He does this every night.”

            He read my concern, his soft mahogany eyes not missing anything.

            “You'll be in a different building.”

            He asked the mandatory questions: why are you here, why would you do that? Then he asked, “Are you here of your own free will?”

            Free will. An interesting concept. Helplessness and solitude destroyed me, the girl I had the chance to be. Am I ever in control of my actions? Something else drove me to do everything: go to the bathroom, wake up, go to sleep, eat, cry, laugh, fuck. Nothing I did was because I wanted to. Nothing.

            “Yeah,” I told him, knowing that would get me around the Baker Act.

            “You should be out within twenty-four hours,” he said, patting my hand. “You're a good girl. You don't belong here.”

            I held fast to his words. I'm a good girl. I don't belong here. He had to be right.

            The next day plodded by. A woman with two black eyes replaced me as the new girl late in the morning. She said she got plastered and fell face first into the coffee table, but the hospital staff was trying to get her to admit that her husband had done it. I sat through a group therapy session where nothing therapeutic took place, then I asked when I was going home.

            “Not till you see the doctor,” the nurse said not looking up from her crossword.

            “Well, when's that?”

            “He'll be in tomorrow.”

            “What?” I screamed at her. “They said I would be able to leave today”

            “Who told you that?” This got her to look up.

            “The guy who checked me in last night. He said they wouldn't keep me more than twenty-four hours. I want to go home.” My voice was escalating. I could feel heat rising in my face, could hear my heart pounding.

            “Well, he shouldn't a told you that,” she said, my outburst not phasing her.

            “Let me the fuck out of here! I'm not crazy, I don't belong in here! Look at these people,” a group of patients had gathered around me as I stomped around the nurse's station. “I don't belong with them. I just have a scratch on my wrist. I won't do it again. Just let me go home!”

            An orderly came up behind me, and the nurse gave a nod.

            “Don't fucking touch me! Let me go! I want to go home!”

            The man dragged me into a room, and locked the door behind me. Still yelling, I looked around. Piss-tinged white padding covered every surface, only the small window in the door broke up the quilted marshmallow starkness. It felt like I was in a movie.

            “Get me the fuck out of here!”

            I hit the walls with all the force my adrenalin would fuel me with.

            “I don't belong in here! I'm not fucking crazy!”

            My Citizen watch, a gift from my ex-fiance and the father of my recently miscarried fetus, came loose and got caught between my angry palm and the wall. Pain stopped me for only a second, the blood from the parallel cuts of the watch band gave me new incentive.

            “You motherfuckers!” I screamed as I smeared my blood like paint on a canvas.

            They didn't let me out. Not until I calmed down, which was an hour later, after I'd had worn myself out. My hand hurt, a worse cut than the one that had landed me in there, my wrist itched from the scabbing, my vocal chords felt grated, and my eyes swollen from tears and embarrassment.

            The next day I met with the doctor. I confessed what I never had to anyone: I heard voices. One voice. My own voice. But it scared me. It was like a song set on repeat telling me to do things. It repeated until I obeyed.

He prescribed some meds and the rest of my stay was uneventful. I talked to my college friends on the phone once or twice. My mom and her boyfriend came to visit me once – or maybe they just came up the day I was released to take me back to school. I don’t remember. I was there five days, I think. The meds really seemed to help – I felt more comfortable in my own head. They released with my agreement to stay in outpatient care. There was an indigent-care facility not too far from campus. I found out on my last day at that facility that the voice – my voice—wasn’t a manifestation of schizophrenia. I had obsessive-compulsive disorder, with a touch of bipolar disorder. The voice was my obsessive thoughts.

            On my second to last day there, the orderly who’d had to restrain me and lock me in that room told me that everyone always comes back. They never see a patient there only one time.

            “I won’t be back,” I assured him.

            “Yeah, you will,” he smirked, but not in a condescending or cruel way. It was with the tone of a man who was jaded by what he saw and dealt with day in and day out.

            “I won’t,” I said and left it at that. He just shook his head.

I never did go back – there or any other in-patient mental health facility.