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In a white hospital bed, pale as the lifeless bones of a decaying skeleton, with my flesh exposed through the backless dress of my hospital gown, I listen to nurses discuss my mental health. I can taste the quiet tap of a pen on paper and their tiny smiles of contempt.
Shame comes in waves. It’s not like a scalpel or the cold touch of a surgeon’s hand. They never tell you that it can eat away at your insides like a virus. (That it eats you alive). Shame is not a symptom of the mentally ill. It’s just a side effect.
In my creased hospital dress, I wish for death. The sweetest sleep away from detached, gloved hands and dissociative expressions. The never-ending hostile questions and the silent blame and accusations lying unspoken on dry lips.
“You did this. You’re not sick. You’re just a twisted, manipulative lunatic.”
Under medication and the slow Novocain drip of sedation, I wish for another disease. I want a tumor in my head – something they can operate. Something tangible, something touchable. Anything but a creeping brain disease that never leaves.
In the terrifying slow descent of an anxiety lapse, in between the strangled gasping breaths, I pray for asthma or a heart attack.
Please.
If I had leukemia, would my family tear my room apart, searching for carcinogens and cigarettes? Would they fold me 1000 paper birds, and stitch love beneath every fragile beating wing?
Would a nurse call me “the cancer kid” the way she said “the suicide” and “the O.D. girl”? Would she speak in the same hollow tones, while her soft-spoken words crept into my bones like a curse.
While my parents cry and hold my broken hands, I ask God for a seizure. I want my limbs out of control. I want a death sentence – terminal – just to never hear the doctors say I have to live. That my disease is incurable.
I pray for quinine and malaria; for sick, fevered flesh.
I swallow my pills with a cold, passionless hatred.
(Quetiapine for bipolar and schizophrenia).
I never sterilize the razors, my scalpel, glass or rusty blades. I’m praying for tetanus, or that one day I’ll step on a syringe.
Would friends abandon me because I inject myself with insulin? Would I be condemned for Heroin, arthritic hands or a leper’s sins?
Am I the one to blame?
Some days I blame the world. I blame the therapists and doctors for never handing me the cure. I send mental death threats to the doctors who asked if this was another cry for help. I scream at photographs of children; smiling and innocent.
And every day I blame myself.
In the psychiatric ward, I wish for Parkinson’s. Then every moment that my bleeding hands and purple lips shook, it wouldn’t be the fear. And it wouldn’t be my fault.
When the nurses bring out the hospital food on plastic trays with smooth plastic forks, I pray for kidney failure or a lung collapse. I want to press the pale knives in past my ribs until they slide through the tendons of my soul. But the mental health ward has only plastic knives. Unserrated, harmless.
My psychiatrist writes me a medical certificate. “My patient is unable to continue her studies because she suffers from a personal illness.”
Even on paper, no one will write the words. We can’t admit that I’m mentally sick. I know my teachers know. Before class, I tried to jump off the roof. When the paramedics searched my bag, they found my contact cards; “Child and Youth Mental Health”.
They used to slide gentle eye over my scars, and turn away with sadness and disgust.
But mental illness is a secret. We can’t own up.
Would my family sign my cast if I broke my wrist? The way the nurses signed my skin in stitches and forgot to kiss my head?
Would I wear long sleeves under the folds of summer skies, to hide my body from a stranger’s soft-veiled eyes? Or paste a plastic smile over infection, and keep it in a jar as a well-worn, well-loved disguise.
Why is a suicide note so different to the treasured letter of a loved-one before the estimated time of death?
A cry for help can be a misheard plea for a mental bill of perfect health. And between every ache, and every bright red scream, there are soft cries and cursive words between every anguished heart beat.
Because the insane and desperate know
That a decaying ruby rose
By any other name
Would smell as sweet.
http://methylated-spirit.deviantart.com/art/A-Rose-by-Any-Other-Name-140197047
