the glass wall

When I went to the nuthouse, I brought two books with me: Orhan Pamuk’s Snow and Gyorgy Konrad’s Stonedial. The latter is the closest I will ever have to a bible; every time I’ve gone somewhere new, that book has come with me. After all, Dragoman wouldn’t have walked through the double doors of the psychiatric hospital with shoulders rounded, arms clenched, flinching at every touch and trying to make himself as small as possible so as not to be hurt; Dragoman would have walked in like he owned the place, grinned, cracked a joke… he would have treated their confiscating of his clothing as amusing and, if I’m sure of anything, it’s that he wouldn’t have spent the better part of three weeks mentally dissembling the curtain rods to get at the sharp bits.

I am not cured, despite their having taken my vitals every morning and having forced me – with threat of indefinite incarceration – to participate in group therapy (the joke of which is that it’s simply voyeurism on the part of the therapist, a contest to see who’s been raped most frequently, or beaten most recently, or attempted suicide most severly, or had the worst hallucation of the day). I am not cured. I spend the better part of every class period caught in a vision of my head being bashed against the concrete block walls until it’s nothing but a mess of skull fragment and brain and blood. And then the delusion starts again, like a record on repeat. I still have paranoid episodes – there are rooms in which I am afraid to talk, because I’m convinced of the presence of microphones. I have retained my sense of terror, this absolute terror for my life, every minute of every day. There is a particular delusion which plagues me like no other, in which there is a hostile entity lodged somewhere between my lungs and brain, a possessive demon whose sole goal is to kill me for no greater purpose than to kill me: I call him my Ghost. He is the personification of my illness. One day in the nuthouse, I sat on the white, white bed in the white, white room and wondered if I would ever be able to survive without him.

I worry about the person I will become when I leave this place… This darkness has been in my soul for so long, it has grown like cancer into my intellect, into my world view, into the very heart of me. My Ghost, my dark passenger, has His claws in my lungs and in the indent at the back of my skull and He digs a little bit deeper every day (like a tick). Am I condemned to this forever? More importantly, will I survive the exorcism? I will pull Ghost from me with both hands, scrape the black from my skull with the kitchen knives, burn it out with cigarettes, bury the palmfuls of tar in the back garden, where it will turn to glass under the pressure of dirt and time. The skeleton it reveals will be thin and brittle, thin and white and clear… will I lose the parts of me that I love? Will there be enough of me to salvage?

The word is schizoaffective, and that’s the word in my file: signs of schizophrenia combined with a major depressive disorder. You have to laugh about it to survive it, downplay it and pretend that, at most, you’re just another sad kid, maybe a little too sensitive, nothing seriously the matter. What can you do but laugh? If you don’t laugh, you have no choice but to return to the quarantine you narrowly emotionally survived. So you start to think of that eventuality, of ways to hide a syringe of air in the soap, you try to remember the boy who hanged himself while you were on the inside, and how he tied the sheets. The concept of psychiatric lock-up is comforting to most people, because despite all rationality. The sane do, it turns out, fear contagion. Susanna Kaysen says it best: People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up there themselves.

I keep thinking that in two years or five years or ten, I will be a different person. I will be better. And I will look back at this time of my life as one looks back at one’s childhood: hazy memories, scattered images and smells. I will forget what it was like to be trapped behing the glass wall, and I think of this… I think of this and it troubles me. You don’t see the scars on my fingers anymore – when my hands were cut to ribbons and the knuckles bled for days – but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s almost Heideggerian bad faith for them not to be there.