I
During my first month of anorexia rehab, the hospital’s tutor tells us about the first patient she taught who starved themselves to death. Tells my fellow adolescent patients and I, kids with shrunken frames and failing organs. I am fifteen. We are all still alive, now, sick and stubborn. The first dead patient is a boy with glowing hair and yellow teeth and lanugo on his cheeks. He sat where we sat, hammered his head against worksheets and essays between DBT groups, walks, meals. He’d gone on to eleven other rehabs—then died on a plane ride to the last one.
You don’t know what you’re doing to yourselves, our tutor says. You don’t know what this does to the people who love you.
She cries. She tells us we know nothing, nothing of life. I believe her.
(But I know the fundamentals of biology. What it takes for a body to fall apart. I spend that first month, then the rest of my adolescence, begging people to live. Saying, Look, this is the thing that will kill us, then diving into the beast’s mouth.
I know paradox. I know the words that I can hang myself with.)
In my second month, I stop eating. Lose the will. My Therapist sticks me in isolation, in an empty hallway, to torment my disorder from my body. Instead, I rot in my skull. Lose my mind in thin, sharp fragments. I suffer memory gaps, hallucinations, loss of language—no words for torture.
After the second week of this, my tutor grows angry. Isolation means no going to therapy groups, but it also means no schooling, no trying to make sense of assignments beyond my capacity. I listen as my teacher yells at the staff, repeating: She’s falling behind, she’s falling behind.
No mention of my folding brain. The framing of my life, my non-life, boiled down to a set of concepts, grades, invaluable values. Institutions in institutions.
A Lesson in Quadratics
Start with a whole. Subtract the last thing you remember, all joys and pains you remember. Subtract sunlight. Subtract people. Add walls, then add the walls together. Like squares and rectangles—a wall is not a floor, but a floor is a wall. Paranoia stacks on starvation. Order of operations. Which part is the first to go? Divide the soul from the mind. Add pills. Primary medication. Squares and rectangles—medicine isn’t food, but is food medicine?
Another patient speaks to me. Tells me that she’s worried I’m dying. Life divides life.
Here’s the thing: I am hard work. I’m a bad equation.
I leave isolation in the third month. Start to eat. The only other avenue out is letting them kill me, diffuse me in the acid of the institution. I won’t give them that. I return to tutoring. Complete burning white worksheets, deep in delusion. Focus. They’re trying to compress me, to divert my life into fractions. I can’t give them that.
***
A Lesson in Disorder
You’re not learning when you’re starving or unstable or insane. You are trying to survive the minute. Trying to make sure your hands are still your hands, that reality is still attached to you by a kite string. That something in you is kicking.
This is clever work: coming alive. Gratitude blooms. I’ve convinced myself that this healing—this return from the abuse of Isolation—is my life’s purpose. That I am fortunate to experience illness as my academia, shrinking in the Saran-wrap of a slow-motion death.
My high school friends text. They are learning World History. They are learning Homecoming. They are learning Dance, Conversation, Living Lightly. I am learning History, too.
History:
Dx Unspecified mood disorder
Dx Anorexia
Dx Major Depression
Dx Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Dx Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Dx Psychosis
Treatment plan: Try not to die mid-narrative
Month five is an English lesson: treatment as a noun without its plurality. A condition rather than a setting. No more I’m in treatment. Instead, I’m receiving bad treatment. I want to find treatment as a verb—a motion that can begin and end. But treatment is infinite, always, a continual series of walls and doorways. I’ll spend my life surviving the leaving, what I inherit from the departure.
A Lesson in Mathematics
I am eating, going to tutoring, to groups. My brain won’t stop melting. Acidic and diseased. So they add. Add Paxil, Buspar. Add schizophrenia medication, hoping to quell the delusions, the cracks in my mind sparked from separation. They add time to my sentence.
See, now? Bad equation.
II
My next three months are spent in an adolescent psychiatric ward. Summertime means no school, but the hospital provides an Education Group led by a lanky woman named Miss M. I don’t remember her instructions. I remember Cody, an eight year-old with a mouthful of fighting words. I remember Angelica, the twelve year-old with a dead dog who threw furniture, creating a rain of sound. I learned what grief looks like aloud—sudden, then still, a breaking wave against the shore of yourself.
Most kids who land in the psych ward are some species of gifted. Children who can solve their way out of their medication dosages, recite book passages from memory, trick their hands to smuggle contraband. A twelve-year-old with cowboy boots and a smattering of freckles writes a seventy-six-page memoir on cyclothymia, his proposed diagnosis. An eight-year-old with psychopathy recites facts about human anatomy. This anorexic girl with a dead twin speaks more languages than I can identify.
When you’re young and insane, you are only ever a point of contention, an idea that hasn’t quite worked out. Still, these kids are brilliant, because they think too much, too hard. They search for avenues out of themselves. They study survival in laborious measures, requiring a rich imagination to place themselves beyond their chaos; to keep their minds preserved.
And they think they’re stupid. Because the people who put them there told them so or didn’t tell them otherwise. Go figure. We’re all hard work.
A Lesson in Debate
I return to public school after nine months in psychiatric care. My therapist in the ward thinks normalcy is a cure. But I return a pariah. With my patient knowledge, my Rolodex of therapeutic terms, a strange cadence to my medicated speech that steers others away.
I last two weeks before officers escort me from class for writing about psychosis. My teacher, bound by a 504 plan, reported me. My counselor says that if I’m suicidal, it’s not safe for me to stay. You think it’s safer to send me to an empty house? I ask. She looks hurt, but not apologetic.
She repeats, You can’t stay here. This is what all of academia has become for me: a cycle of you can’t stay here, repeated silencings. My disability (liability) asks me to forfeit what’s left of my youth.
In month ten of psychiatric care, the only academic word that enters my sphere is MASCOT. Like, Piper’s been here so long, she’s the mascot. Phrases like that make you realize you don’t belong anywhere.
They enroll me in psych ward school, a three-teacher circus where every class is a suggestion, but there’s no point. I am absent in myself. They try new medications, a quiet handful of pills. I sleep. Go unconscious on the floor of the unit, the couch, my desk. In school, my English teacher props a pillow under my head. She’s seen other dead kids walking. I wonder if they know nothing of life, too.
A Lesson in English
As my former peers collect SAT words on their tongues, I find ways to pronounce the excess of meds that nail me to the cross:
Latuda +
Lamictal +
Zyprexa +
Klonopin +
Olanzapine +
Risperdal +
A Lesson in Chemistry
Study what reacts together. The chemicals. What causes the sleepfulness, the headaches, the vibrations in my limbs—the shrinking elastic of my cognitions. I picture the prescriptions made imaginary, withdrawn from a space where new terms get invented and lost. I imagine smashing them apart, watching their colored powder fall like snow.
A Lesson in Loss
I wake up in breathless pockets of time, find lucidity in breaks between the pills. I have no memories, no hours. Every lacuna in my story exists in a chart, in a blue Bible of prescriptions, yellow slips of party words. Months are months are months. I learn to read an analog clock in the hospital dayroom. I eat in spurts, a coalition of side dishes.
When was the last time I ran? Sang? Wrote?
Month eleven is testing month. For my former peers, finals. Me, theories. Prescribe the pills, then see if they stick. Psychotropia is all trial and error, education for the Psychiatrists. Order of operations, you see—the process of elimination. Bad equations all around. It’s a kind of magic trick: to plug in four pills, eight pills, ten pills, and end up with nothing.
A Lesson in Resistance
At the end of month eleven, I refuse all the meds. Test the waters.
I go manic. I fly. I sing the body electric.
But basic laws of gravity also apply in the psych ward—what goes up, must come down.
When I crash, they evaluate, see what is under the pills, and decide:
History (A Revisionist Account):
Dx Unspecified mood disorder (?)
Dx Anorexia
Dx Major Depression
Dx Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Dx Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Dx Bipolar One
Dx Bipolar Two
Dx Mixed Bipolar
Dx OSFED
Dx Thought Disorder
Dx Psychosis
Dx Underwater, drowning
Treatment plan: Resuscitate until the damage is too extensive
III
Twelve months into institutionalization, they send me to residential treatment. A new biome. Full of laws, demands. The staff here want to make us useful. Not useful like a song or a wrench. Useful as in quiet. No moving without permission. No speaking freely. Vocabulary words become forbidden: I love you, tattoos, drinking, drugs, gay, friend. Consequences include Isolation, sleeping on the floor, loss of speech. Rules stack up, expand, become deeper holes to fall into. Unlearn empathy, optimism, kindness, or land in hot water, boil alive.
Whoever said knowledge is power is right on the nose. With learning comes compassion, radical love. Love leads to revolt. They hope to make critical thought scarce, to starve us out of ourselves. To teach us how to be silent, how to accept punishment, how to be small to the world.
A Lesson in Treatment (singular noun)
Your personality is a bag of symptomology. Your heart is a wet feather, your mind, a weighted ball. Everything in you is made to sink.
***
In my thirteenth month, I watch my six-four history teacher tackle a thirteen-year-old who tries to run. This instructor makes us start class by listing positives. The girl who ran was excited for her mother to visit. He said, You think she’s gonna be proud that you’re here? So she ran. He brought her to the dirt. She gets dragged back to the unit. A kind of arrest. The teacher returns, hands us textbooks.
What do I do with this? I ask.
He looks at me with the same adrenaline that he reserved for the running girl, that gazelle of complication. I swallow the question, find safety in the unknowing.
A Lesson in Government
Those in power will only take a second look to make sure you’re still underwater. They will always watch you drown; you are easier dead.
I meet with the psychiatrist. He works for an international poetry magazine. He reads me Pablo Neruda, a poem about a rose and an island and the day coming undone, then gives me a history test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. The results say:
History (A Secondary Revisionist Account):
Dx Unspecified mood disorder (?)
Dx Anorexia
Dx Major Depression
Dx Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Dx Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Dx Bipolar One
Dx Bipolar Two
Dx Mixed Bipolar
Dx OSFED
Dx Thought Disorder
Dx Psychosis
Dx Borderline Personality Disorder
Treatment plan: Extinguish the child, and the disorder might die
On month fourteen, I develop aphasia. 100mg of Lamictal pushes me over a cliff in myself. I forget how to write and read. Can’t understand language, the weight of a word. The staff are all Charlie Brown adults. Despite crying through breakfast, unable to form a sentence, I get sent to class. It takes an hour to write three words. My teacher crumples them up, an acidic laugh escaping his body.
A Lesson in Philosophy
A person without language is a cage in themselves.
During my fifteenth month, I master line dancing. We dance each Sunday. Nothing says Texas psych ward education like a head nurse in cowboy boots teaching us country footwork at 10 a.m. “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” is her favorite, this nurse. Kick, kick, cross-step, kick, rock, cross-step, turn.
Anyone who refuses to dance gets a Consequence.
This Sunday, I don’t trip over my own feet. I’ve learned, by now, that falling is a perpetual state—the collapse is a kind of opening. Later, I earn outdoor privileges. I cross the courtyard, my bones full of acid. Swallowtails dive for the ground like bombers. I am not here, not myself. Ejected.
In months sixteen and seventeen, we are not allowed to speak to each other. To subtract our voices—the last site of autonomy—makes us docile, easy to wipe. Those who speak are Consequenced.
(We are not here; you may as well kill us.)
We learn nothing in history or English or science. We are all closed doors, blocked alleys of bodies. We are all silent, sitting in long stretches of Isolation, watch the sun leave one another’s eyes.
A Lesson in Science
A supernova bursts. How long after it dies before we see the light?
They let me go on month eighteen. Slip away like a whisper.
My insurance has run out. I am free.
(A Lesson in Geography
I am nowhere.
I don’t know what to do with all this rage. All this loss. I am sorry I am not more grateful.)
IV
On my first month out, I find that my handwriting has grown illegible. Chicken scrawl. All I can do is write. After those shrinking months, English is the last tool I can hold. I morph my handwriting to adopt the harsh angles of upper-case letters. My words are walls, a series of rooms, my attempt to place myself anywhere. (I haven’t yet learned why treatment [plural noun] didn’t work.)
On bad nights, when I can’t find the rabbit hole into sleep, I think about beating the shit out of that head nurse. The line dancer. Imagine her face going red, slack. Her feet: cross-step, kick, turn. After all this time, I think that the Staff did open my mind. Fostered this vivid imagination.
A Lesson in Paradox
I haven’t slept in years, but I still can’t seem to wake up.
***
V
An Unlesson
After four years, I come into a community of troubled-teen industry survivors. I find others like me, others with sliced tongues and lost knowledge. I enter a stage that they call deprogramming. This is a technical undertaking, a procedure of removal. An unwinding of a tight coil. This turning relieves the pressure, yet energy, within the Laws of Motion, must move outwards—and it does. Infects everything. Sparks storms of anger and hope.
As I deprogram, I find new behaviors to unlearn, thoughts to extract and kill.
It’s a science: You do not realize how deep the roots run until you begin to pull.
I try to drain the sanitization from psychotropia. Keep human, keep real. To touch is a lesson. To love, a lesson. To laugh, to rest. You can’t do shit with algebra in the ward. Biology or chemistry, either. But I can hold panic, cradle a seizure, collapse a wave of shame. I can cheek a pill and cry in silence. I can grasp the face of a tourist in madness—tell them it gets better. Sometimes, I can mean it.
History (A Present Account):
Dx Unspecified mood disorder (?)
Dx Anorexia
Dx Major Depression
Dx Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Dx Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Dx Bipolar One
Dx Bipolar Two
Dx Mixed Bipolar
Dx OSFED
Dx Thought Disorder
Dx Borderline Personality Disorder
Dx Psychosis
Dx Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Treatment plan: Stop blaming yourself. Patch the wound. Make use of the language that’s here.
History (As A Science)
This past, these people, these institutions—they live half-lives in my brain. Shrink, but never fully disintegrate. These freckles of traumas, small but calculated, occupy a desert within me. They sting, harden, a firm pain. But I host them. Hold their company. Drop water into the sand.
This is to say: I will make use of my anger. I will unlearn, relearn.
I know the words I can use to climb.
***
Rumpus original art by Carl Dimitri
