Ten Things You May Learn During Your Stay(s) in the Psych Ward

this is an old piece i came across the other day, from a couple years ago.

1. There is real crazy in the world, the kind that mumbles under its breath as it stalks the hallways, uncomfortable and smelly, always up in your personal business, searching under chairs for cigarettes that were never there, imagining whole pregnancies out of whole cloth.

2. There really are people who talk to other people that aren’t there. These people will have conversations that you can never be a part of, because you do not possess what they may or may not call the gift, of seeing what others do not.

3. Your friends may never look at you in the same way again. On the other hand, they may. You never know which way people are going to go when everything is unspooled. Be brave.

4.If there is a fire alarm there may be at least one person who holds her hands over her ears and screams in symphony with it, her wails nearly outpacing the alarm itself. This will strike you as a perfectly reasonable way to respond. She is hearing alarms you don’t hear, but then again, you are hearing alarms she doesn’t, and we all have to respond like there’s a fire even if it was only smoke.

5. At first the food will turn to dust in your mouth, choking with shame. Eat anyway. Someday you will be hungry again.

6. You may have a visitor and during your visit perhaps a nurse will bark at you, suddenly, “go that way.” This will not surprise you but it will startle your visitor. She does not understand, in the deep-boned way that you do, how danger lurks behind each face, how quickly each of you can turn into something dangerous, a snake that must be handled. You know to let the staff handle the snake. Your visitor still thinks we are all staff.

7. Your visitor will not understand, either, how another patient can sit next to you and within ten minutes you have the highlights of each other’s misery, the parents who were absent or crazy or abusive, the addictions that pocket your bodies with scars, the myriad ways you have fucked up. Your collective suffering will spool out like yarn, each thread more unendurable than the last, and yet–and yet!–here you both are.

8. You will listen to another patient as she comes out of the place that took her over, a place so deep even you cannot travel there. You will listen as her voice tremors with every new revelation, every new piece of horror that comes from a place so far from Home that you were unaware, until now, it existed on the same planet. You will look at her. You will not look away.

9. You will howl so hard and so long that you will feel that you are being cleaved in two. You will stare at yourself in the safety glass mirror, at the way your tears have distorted the face you once recognized, as you are slammed again and again and again into the same unbreakable truth: the only way out is through.

10. Sometime–maybe not this time or the next time or the time after that or even the time after that, but sometime–your howling will quieten enough for you to hear your heartbeat, as nebulous and reassuring as a baby bird fresh out its nest, and you will clutch those tiny translucent wings, bone and tissue papery in your hands, the kind that could fall apart just as easily as they could hold, and you will hope like hell.