The interlude of incarceration.

One sixteen year old's experience of psychatric "lock-up" and her attempt to gain control of herself in an enviroment where she was stripped of any - left staring out from behind bullet-proof windows.

And I don’t know whether or not I want to forget... As the light flickers over me, here in my own bed - switching on and off at seemingly random intervals, I somehow draw a link in my memory to a nurse, switching my light off sometime during the night all those months ago, almost a year now. And I wake, screaming for fear of the dark. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this!  Its laughable, the conclusions that the mind draws. It’s like someone mending a tear, sewing the two pieces back together again. The only difference here is that my links, unlike that careful stitching, are so illogically irrelevant. They come from nowhere. Yet the memory remains, clear and shinny as a bell in my mind. I can hear her whispering in the dark as my screams turn to sobs, “it’s okay Luce, it’s okay, it’s okay.” She’s there my doorway, then she is switching the light back on for me and inching the door back to almost-shut – so she can keep that all seeing eye on me as I twitch and sleep and try not to dream. I pull my knees to my chest, wrap the brightly coloured hospital doona tight around me and my pull stuffed animals close. I know that she’s still standing there - outside my door. She, the nurse, is waiting quietly, keys to the drug cabinet in hand, waiting patiently to see whether or not she needs to medicate me back to into that fitful, groggy, frightening sleep again...

I feel that sometimes I define myself by those six weeks I was deemed “crazy” and locked away in a “psychiatric facility” – with its glass doors, shinning through to the world outside, a world I could not reach. Sometimes I define myself, still, by the scars that I still have in my arms and my legs and across my wrists, for each & every single one of those days. I can trace a memory to each one - and then some. There is definition, still, in the places where the IVs entered my arms and the where the ever watchful eyes burnt holes through my back. It is in these strange memories that I find odd, panging tangles of comfort of fear and of regret and definition. I try to tell myself “this isn’t me” because I thought that I was more than an old red folder in the nurse’s station with my name stamped down the spine in letters larger than life. However, this question I still have no answer for brews, again and again in my mind. Who am I? If I am not that red, stamped foldered girl – who am I? Who am I? It echoes through my mind, over and over and over – who am I?

 

Those weeks, now long past - saw me learn to sleep in a bed where I began to feel safe. “My” bedroom was almost a comfort to me then & being uprooted from it was frightening. From my bedroom window, thick as thick, I could see a bright, round, yellow light – somewhat like the moon - that reflected a massive window in the new block of flats, far opposite. The glass of the window was bullet proof and so thick that another patient couldn’t even break with a metal chair, thrown in manic rage. My window sill was lined with offerings & the Unit Manager always laughed when she wheeled her bike past my window of an evening on her way home. She’d come back the next morning to tell me that my sill proved I’d been there far too long. The thoughtful cards carefully printed with “get well soon,” small gift bears bearing messages of “I love you” & photo frames with glass panes that somehow escaped anyone’s attention were testament to my incarceration. Each time another person picked up one of those photo frames to tell me how beautiful we all were - there inside the boundaries of the decorated metal frame was another reminder of the time passing me by, and of the world that kept spinning without me.

 

On my window sill I always kept a ripe orange, an old green, tattered tennis ball and a homemade stress ball of rice and pink balloons that one of the nurses’s once made me in the middle of the night. I kept them closest to my head, on the edge of the sill, so they were always there for me, just in case. The staff encouraged me to squeeze them in my fists whenever I felt an overwhelming urge or a surge of anxiety. I’m doubtful that they ever served this purpose well, but their presence on the window sill helped to comfort me.

 

On my desk were flowers, sent to me by a friend of my mother that seemed to be eternally dying. They lasted so long, but every morning I’d scrape away the dead petals that fell to the floor. The petals turned from vibrant, cheerful purples and yellows to crumpled, fragile browns before the fell – flittered to the ground. I’d walk across the hall to dispose of them in the toilet garbage – almost as though I threw away a piece of myself each morning, tearing back layers upon layer until finally I found that there was nothing there – that I was essentially empty - and the world continued on spinning without me.

 

Top draw was for underwear, in no particular order at all – I just tossed it just, bras and knickers on top of each other.  I folded my clothes in the bottom of the musty yellow wardrobe so that I had to take the effort of bending now to reach them in the mornings. Dirty clothes I threw under my desk until the pile was big enough for me to timidly knock at the nurse’s station door and quietly ask if someone could take me to do my washing (because you see, the laundry was locked to the prying, unstable hands and eyes of patients.)

 

Along my desk I carefully lined my folders of schoolwork that taunted me every time I tried to sit at my desk until one day the nurses sent those all home with my angry mother, protesting I had plenty of time doing almost nothing at all to spend on schoolwork. School work sent me into stresses of crying fits that were ending with the pop of a small, yellow valium and an afternoon on my bed in a groggy stupor. On one side of the desk I kept an ever-growing pile of pieces of paper collected from “group”. Once I had hoped that these held the answers – that, may somehow in their papery eternity, show me to path to salvation. Endless sheets of paper: mood diaries, coping strategies, anger management, inspirational quotes, pieces of art & endless word competitions that I long ago gave up on & sent as a gift to recycling.

 

Over the fake glass mirror I’d used yellow coloured blue tack to tack up the paintings that were offered as gifts from other patients and from visiting nursing students. I still have them today; hidden in a bag in my real bedroom, papery reminders of the places I have been. These paintings were interchanged with photos from the outside world – girls in formal dressers, smiles plastering the wall, yet another sharp reminder of the turning world I was locked away from.

 

I’d throw two towels from the patient linen cupboard over the back of my chair when my own pink towel spent hours turning in the dryer. Even though they weren’t the homely, comforting pink of my own, but the standard hospital issue white with blue “Health Service” in large, glaring letters printed down them, they were safe & clean. Having them hanging there each morning when I woke to shower gave me another, slight semblance of control in a contained world where I had none.

 

The top shelf of my wardrobe housed treasured and banned possessions – the small box of hope that Chloe made for me the day she left – was released to freedom, the headband I accidentally snapped in half and then discovered other (more dangerous) uses for, inscribing meaning in my skin with it & then our Monopoly set. The Monopoly set eventually got rehoused in the nurse’s station when an especially prudent nurse deemed it too “unsafe” to be left in plain patient view, citing fears of broken plastic and choked metal.

 

My growing collection of stuffed toys sat, lined up against my white, hospital-issue pillow, guarding the slight crack of the doorway for me. These were the only people I trusted inside the house of haphazard terror. Those nurses used to laugh, especially at my toy ducks. Amber & Mary said they looked more like platypuses than ducks. They said I was, at sixteen, too old for toys. Of course I always feigned offence but they tucked me in with them at night none the less. They tucked them under my arms after checking underneath my tongue for hidden pills gone astray and then left me there behind a half open door to sleep that drug induced sleep – toys to guard me.

 

The safest place of all was always behind my bedroom door. There is no way to count the number of times a nurse opened the door inwards, wide enough to bump me in the shins, without realising I was there. Then they’d wish they used their power and that special key they wore around their necks to open it outwards instead of the inwards direction, toward the hidden me. There is nowhere to hide in a place like that – where there are surveillance cameras in the hallways and the nurse’s station is windowed on all sides. You live in a goldfish bowl and you are the goldfish, panicked and stuck. You are the object of interest, to be watched, scrutinised and noted on – constantly. They are watching when you wake up in the morning, when you throw you potatoes at the walls during dinner, when you bawl your eyes out silently, staring out the window and when you drift off into a medicated sleep at night. There is no escape from them – from the all seeing eye of nurse, of doctor – even of the cleaner, who opens your door at seven-am to change the garbage bin that you never use, anyway. Hiding behind the door was the only way to get away. The day Nicole went home I sat behind the door and cried until a nurse came and sat with me, an attempt to dam the flood of tears. Then again the day Francesca went home. And then when I needed to make the noise that was indisputably disallowed, to feel the pain they were trying to prevent me from inflicting. I’d hide there behind the door and hit my head as hard as I could in to the wall, over and over again, knowing it made enough noise to bring them running but in too much pain to care. I knew it take them longer to find me there and I just needed it. I had to hurt myself in a way I wasn’t allowed to because being closed inside this goldfish bowl – being the goldfish – was too much for a sixteen year old mind to bear. I was sixteen and I was in pain, frightened, confused and often in a medicated daze. I needed anything that would push the tides back, even for a moment. It was too much.

 

This small room was my comfort, my small, blue carpeted haven in a place where there was so refuge, no respite. On the other hand perhaps I’m being sentimental and melodramatic... It was just a bedroom where the staples in the bed’s mattress get counted every other daily and the air-conditioning vents are checked by nurses on step ladders until one by one, the vents break – snap in half and are useless. It wasn’t my room & it wasn’t really safe, but when you have nothing you must build something in order to believe that you are safe. You are to try to believe, against all the odds and expectations – that you have the chance to be okay (whatever okay is). The world on the outside, the real world - was spinning on its axis without me in it, turning and changing and being while somehow I let myself get left behind, locked away - stuck and motionless - staring emptily out from behind a bullet proof window.

Reviews

[Hannerr.]

I love this. The honesty about the faked safety of the room in the last paragraph was superbly effective.

'It wasn't my room & it wasn't really safe, but when you have nothing you must build something in order to believe that you are safe.'

Definitely my favourite statement in the piece.

Huge fan of your writing, keep writing stuff like it!

Hannerr.