On Valentine's Day I Went to the Hospital

cw suicide

I was nineteen, a freshman in college, a dance major, when the blood on my legs threatened the linoleum floor of a Westchester county psych ward. “Please,” my throat on fire, “I just need a fucking tampon.” The nurse, my father’s age but still maintaining a patchy adolescent beard, habitually sucked his teeth and ticked his checklist. “It’s just protocol. We see blood, we have to check. I’m sorry.” I was moved back down the hallway I had come from, flanked by nurses in matching outfits. 

In a quiet room, I stripped down to my underwear. The small tooth tattooed just above my hip bone grinned at the hands that followed the outline of my jaded, hungry body. They never touched me, just counted: stretch marks, piercings, bruises. Trophies of puberty and teenage rebellion and clumsiness. I was still bleeding. When I returned to my room to cry on the bathroom floor, my body unspooled into parts: legs, arms, ribs, skull and gray brain matter, all melting into the tile. The line between me and that hospital no longer existed. 

Once the fickle mistress of a New York winter had skinned yet another Californian alive, I took a tearful taxi through the streets of my college town to the nearest emergency room. My attempt to slip out of our dorm room unnoticed failed and my roommate held my hand in the backseat. I watched the snow tumble down the windows, running my fingers across my scalp in an attempt to push the worry from my temples to the filthy upholstered floor. “I’m so fucking tired,” I told her. She sighed. 

“Yeah. Mondays.”

The intake nurse was young; maybe ten years my senior. When he asked me why I came, I said only that my therapist had told me to. I could not bring myself to say that I often felt so sad I thought it was going to kill me. I could not bring myself to say that my boyfriend could hardly stand to look at me. I could not bring myself to describe the plot of the double-feature fantasies that played in my head as I stood at the edge of every set of train tracks in Manhattan. They took my clothes and my shoelaces. They cut the strings off my notebooks, the ones that held my secrets and my shame and every song I’d ever written. It was Valentine’s Day.

The weeks leading up to my hospitalization found me an overwrought cliche, sitting on the fire escape of my dorm, reading Sylvia Plath and smoking the occasional cigarette. My smudged eyeliner told the world of my sleeplessness; my journal entries were meticulously prepped for publication after my seemingly impending death. I cried in public. I stopped pulling my punches and it was so romantic. Cradled by the seemingly noble proclivities of my own suffering, I accepted that while I was not destined for solace, I could at least have poetry. My body was a haunted house for me and my sadness, a vehicle for my shame, a sex object, a loaded gun, but at least I was beautiful. 

Margaret Atwood says, “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman.” That man’s eyes followed me everywhere I went, penning my own perfect little tragedy. Between my under-eye bags, my emaciated frame, and my slipping ability to attend class, I performed to a yellow wallpaper audience who applauded my classic narrative choices and debonair waif aesthetic. 

Naked under a thin layer of hospital gown in the penetrating February air, I wondered if the lesbian EMT who loaded me into the ambulance thought I was pretty. She knew my name and my social security number, my address at school and my diagnoses. I was a woman with a man inside. I was my own voyeur, but there’s a protocol for these kinds of things. They take your clothes and your shoelaces. There is no one to witness you being beautiful. They don’t know that you’re a writer. They don’t know the size of your waist. It doesn’t matter. 

During my two week stay, I kept meticulous journals. I told of my cold showers and my medication regimens in excruciating detail. The cast of characters was as follows: Giana, the 25-year-old fellow Taylor Swift superfan undergoing electroconvulsive therapy and being threatened with state hospital. Nick, the handsome Italian eight years my senior who taught me to play chess, the recipient of both my affection and my daddy issues. Izzie was annoying. Harper was funny. My roommate was a 30-year-old nurse who wouldn’t leave the room when I took a shit, even though our sorry excuse for a bathroom door was something closer to a gymnastics mat. I prayed to the silver landlines in the hallway for an hour a day to ensure the world wouldn’t forget about me. I wasn’t really speaking to my parents during this time, other than the obligatory calls to my mother where she’d lament how tired she was and never ask me how I felt. Instead, I leaned on my boyfriend, who hated me. He’d ask me about my day; I’d tell him. A girl with hollow cheeks who spoke to no one had to be strapped down and sedated by injection and her screams were still rattling through my teeth. “Why are you telling me this?” he replied. He didn’t really want to know. He was just asking to ask.  

There were very few clocks on the walls in the hospital. According to one staffer on the floor, this was to avoid disorienting patients experiencing psychosis, but the inevitable fallout was that I infrequently knew what time it was. That bleak midwinter put the sun down at 4:30 and my sleep schedule into disarray. One still afternoon at the end of my first week found me languishing in bed beneath a thin terry cloth blanket, until: 

“Sorry to interrupt your nap,” said a man’s voice. “I’m just here to talk to you.” 

Charlie was a psychiatrist in his early forties. Short, balding, in the most normal pressed blue shirt you’ve ever seen, he spoke with a monotonous vocal fry that rivaled even the most prolific of internet princesses. He asked me about my childhood, and the sexual abuse, my father, my mother, my anorexia. In the psych ward, much of your non-psychotropic care is found in group therapy, which 19-year-old me would have described as “kind of bullshit.” For someone to sit across from me, just me, and ask about my pain, just my pain, was a revelation. I unhinged my jaw and let nearly two decades spill out across the floor. 

After what seemed like hours, I came to a stop. Charlie looked at his clipboard, and then at me. In the stillness, I was a wounded animal, frantically searching his stone face for a hint of a reaction. 

“You seem like you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how fucked up you are,” he said, in a tone so matter-of-fact it seemed almost mocking. I stared at him for a moment, and then burst out laughing.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do.” That wasn’t the response I was hoping for. 

“It’s okay, that’s pretty normal. It sounds like you’ve been in a lot of pain, for a really long time. Sometimes it can feel like the only way to prevent the pain is by endlessly searching for problems before they start. But if there was something to really worry about, we would have seen it already.”

He was so detached as he delivered my prognosis. I was suddenly aware of my desire to knock the wind out of him, only to find that I couldn’t. “It sounds like you’ve been in a lot of pain,” he had said. I thought that’s what I’d been searching for: someone to bear witness to my suffering. I was born in 2002. I got my first cell phone at age 11. My Tumblr account dates back to the seventh grade. I am and have always been a child of the internet, and a girlchild at that. My whole life has been a series of vignettes that beg for an audience, and there I was, getting spooked by the spotlight. 

Equal parts comforted and unsteady, I realized that what I was really hoping he would give me was permission to give up. “Thanks for coming into the ward,” he’d say, giving me a quick once-over. “Shit, kid. You look like hell. You should probably go have a bunch of unprotected sex with strangers and then smoke a cigarette while gassing up your car. By the way, do you listen to Elliott Smith?” I was born to be witnessed, but they took my phone and my shoelaces and the strings from my notebooks. My attempts to editorialize the most horrific experiences of my life were failing, because suddenly I was without an audience that I could shock. Charlie had seen this before. 

After I was discharged, I dropped out of college and moved back home to California. My mother’s health was failing for the tenth time in two years. She moved out of the house I was raised in. My father took every photograph of her off the walls. The boyfriend who hated me, my first love, the only person who had ever seen me naked, left me. I told him I would love him for the rest of my life, and I meant it. I turned my face up to the sun and prayed for it to make me whole again. 

It’s summer now. I’m sitting in my little house in Los Angeles, where I have lived for the several months since I packed my life into two suitcases and stuffed them into my sedan. My holy stack of notebooks, stringless, sit on my bedside table. On the last few pages, you’ll find an early draft of this essay, scribbled with the “safety pen” they gave to patients so we could write, but not self-injure. I began the day I was discharged—still adjusting to life outside the hospital, I allowed myself to sob while I wrote on the train to Connecticut, fat teardrops landing on the paper. The body was still warm, but I had to get it down. I was a woman with a man inside, and together, we rifled through our pockets for bits of loose-change memory, something akin to truth. There are details of this story that I’ve left out, ugly things I said or did to people who loved me. I’ve tried to be honest, but there are moments where my fingers won’t allow it, lest I smudge some perfect portrait with my messy human hands. Even now, I am a woman with a man inside. Even now, I feel around in the dark for some kind of three-act structure to my suffering. Even now, when I have been swallowed whole and spit back out again, I wonder if my narrator is likable, or at least fuckable. Even now, I take photographs of myself when I cry and wonder if, when money gets tight, I might be able to sell them.