Musings from the mental hospital
by Elsie Coyne
October 4, 2024
In the emergency room, they watch you go to the bathroom through a window, and they don’t let you close the door all the way. They take all your stuff and your clothes and watch you like a hawk. 24-hour surveillance, either through the lens of a camera or their own furtive gaze. They don’t give you silverware, not even plastic. Instead, you fold up a little origami spoon and try to shovel half edible stewed tomatoes in your mouth before the paper dissolves on your tongue. You are dangerous. You can’t be trusted. Privacy and bras and dignity and forks are not for crazy people.
October 5, 2024
The thing about the psych hospital is that it swallows you whole. Every sense is overwhelmed by it. The lights are so aggressively bright you can’t see a thing, except your life crumbling around you. You can see the rubble through clouds of dust—all that’s left of your carefully constructed life. You hear a cacophony of horrible, drowning sounds. Some are quiet, like the voices of nurses and doctors talking about you like you aren’t even real. Others are loud, louder than anything. Alarms going off, people weeping and screaming, begging to go home or stay put or to die or to finally live. None of them are louder than your own brain, though, or the collapse of your own reality. You’ve failed yet again. You can taste it, right along with the powdered egg substitute and bitter pills.
October 6, 2024
“How are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Give me a word for your mood. A descriptor.”
“Sad. Numb.”
Numb. It shouldn’t be possible to feel sad, too. Numb means nothing. It means grey, blank stares, empty brain, nothing. But somehow, you’re still sad, too. You feel hardly anything. You can’t cry, can’t emote, can’t see past the clouds and the dull and the white walls. And that makes you so unbelievably sad. Because you used to be full to the brim. You used to be blue, sunny skies with birds and butterflies and life, life, life. Now you’re dead, dead, dead. And isn’t that just your way? Up and down and up and down. You’re so sick of the merry-go-round. The sticky sweet cotton candy that sours in your stomach, lurching and sloshing all around. You’re tired of it all. You just want to get off the ride. It’s not fun anymore.
“Rate it for me. One being the worst you’ve ever felt, ten the best.”
I don’t know, you want to say.
“Three, I guess,” you say instead.
October 7, 2024
It’s been forever. It’s been five minutes. Time doesn’t exist here. Your brain pushes and pulls you in a thousand different directions while each tick of the clock feels like a million years. Nothing is real, and certainly not the passage of time. Hours go by and you sit and you wait and you hope for your brain to snap into focus, to function like you’re actually a normal human being. You tell your tragic little tale to what feels like a hundred different people and every time it feels more like someone else’s reality. You’re just spinning a story. The girl who wanted to take those pills and end her world, she’s just fiction. You stop being you. You’re a character, and not even the main one. You’re hardly there, another faceless figure in the revolving door. Another nameless number in this desolate place where everyone aches and no one exists.
October 8, 2024
I write about this like it’s happening to someone else. “You” this and “you” that. I separate myself. I write in metaphors and similes, talk about the food and the lights and the sounds and the ticking of the clock, and it’s all a distraction from reality. I’m here. I am. Not an abstract stranger. I can’t separate myself with clinical observations because I’m here. No matter what I write or how I float above my own body, I wanted to die, so I landed myself here. Does that make me more or less real? This understanding that it’s me. Am I real now? Or does my diseased brain negate that? Can I be real if half of what I think and feel and do is because my mind is sick, infiltrated by an illness no one can see—no one wants to see—because it’s trapped in my mind? Can you be real if you can’t trust your own self?
October 9, 2024
There are scribbles all over the place On the bathroom walls, in the communal shower, scrawled across furniture. Left there by some mad artist, trying to say something I can’t quite understand. The pencil and crayon renderings kind of look how I imagine my brain does. Scattered and random and flighty—scared, desperate. Sometimes it’s more than scribbles. Sometimes there are angry words or hopeful platitudes like “peace and love!” I prefer the abstract. It feels busy like my brain. It feels hurried and detached from reality. There is no explanation and none of my thoughts lately can be explained. They aren’t normal or even real. Are they real? Am I real? I wonder that a lot. At least the scribbles are real. And maybe the person who made them didn’t feel very real either. But aren’t those drawings proof that we are?
October 10, 2024
Halloween is right around the corner. There’s a chill in the air and skeletons in the yard and demons in my soul and cobwebs in my brain. We color ghosts, the kind of craft for kindergarteners and also, so it would seem, crazy people. They ask me to leave my room, mingle, color with the others. A scarier prospect than the spookiest of ghost stories. Because we’re real. And we’re ghosts—living ones, the worst kind. There’s a girl sitting there. Young, angry, not coloring. Speaking, raging, to no one. “Screw this place,” and “I need to get out,” and “I want my mom.” I do, too. I don’t at all. The selfish part of me longs for her. For her gentle touch and her hands that hold my face along with all the love in the world and her stormy eyes that shift from strong to scared to oh-so sad, back to strong again. The part that hates myself, hates my weakness and failure, wants to hide away forever. To never see myself reflected in my mother’s grey-blue eyes again, to never see them so stormy and turbulent, shifting with constant anxiety. That part of me thinks I should stay locked away with the others who get trapped in their minds. Clawing and dying and longing to get out. None of us succeeding.
October 11, 2024
I’m home. Everything is different and nothing has changed.
Elsie Coyne was born and raised in Pittsburgh where she spent her childhood days writing in her diary and playing make-believe with her siblings in the backyard. She developed a passion for mental health advocacy after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which has inspired her writing today. She now resides in Cleveland, Ohio where she is a graduate student.