I have figured out that people seem to like non-fiction better than novel excerpts on here. Here is another clipping from my diaries regarding being in a âhospital for people who think too much.â My wife was leaving me and this was starting to become more of a focus.
Notebook 8B - Four Winds, Saratoga Springs
Must be like October 2010. Back in the âhospital for people who think too much.â I was planning to cut my wrists, I had the x-acto knife I was going to do it with, Iâd get into a powerful not unpleasant trance and go in my parentâs basement and just hold the knife and look at it. It was like floating in a river on a tube, very relaxing and like youâre getting pulled into something natural. Then Iâd snap out of it. I told people about it and here I am.
A NON THREATENING FONT
words to look up in Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchensâ memoir
trahism
arrogation
immured
minatory
langue de bois
hecatomb
riparian
skirling
regnant
flaneur
The set up in my room at the hospital is a cruel echo of bed at home.
JIMMY THE PSYCH WARD NURSE RE:
DISTRESS TOLERANCE
âPain and distress are part of life.â He says âdistressfulâ instead of distressing. âColumnistâ instead of calmness. âCut it off at the path.â âTake a different tact.â Something is âconducive of ____________.â Something grammatically wrong. Iâm a bastard to get caught up in the staffâs poor grammar, looking down on them. Part of avoiding therapy, as itâs described on the diary card. The diary card is given to you at the beginning of the day, and youâre supposed to give a number to that dayâs level of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation (called âS.I.â so youâre not saying the word which is like a bad word to say around people). Later weâll play a game on a whiteboard which I am swift enough not to call âHANGMAN,â instead itâs âWORD GAME.â The nurse practitioner will have words with me about this in private: âyou shouldnât have done that.â Contagion of suicidal ideas.
âIt is true that the unbounded areas and fields of ones ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful.â âChristopher Hitchens.
How am I going to start reading War and Peace again? It drags on my heart like the hook in a fish's lip caught.
In marriage, I was K.âs rough draft. I was her first draft. Sheâs an English teacher. There are her boundaries which you're expected to see as self-evident, âwhy didn't you already know that?â Her boundaries. She won't let you know she's setting them. Like tripwires, you only learn of their existence by crossing them. Maybe the assumption is if youâre married for eight years you should know this stuff if you want to fight off the wolves of divorce. Am I a little angry and bitter? Probably. But I do feel this pressure to conform to the forces of divorce. Which she seems to intuitively know, although her wrath flares up at the mention of âthis is the first time I've been through a divorce.â She insists she hasn't either, then chides me for my emotional untidiness, my non-observance of her crypto-rules which she must have got from somewheres.
My sadness is brooding, the 95% is showing. Is the 5% a lie? (I donât recall what these percentages stood for. Something about 5% on the surface is showing youâre okay?) The need to be honest if I'm in pain, I am with my mother and sister. Everytime a different person enters or leaves the room in the hospital, the atmosphere, the social dynamic changes. I need to conduct myself differently based upon who's thereâa young woman. It's hard to be the right kind of person cause you know you're just being rejected over and over again, every second.
10/29
(Later the girl said she liked my problems.)
Why do I care? Do I think I actually have a chance? What is up with my sexual scanning of all women I encounter whilst mourning the end of my relationship with my wife? (There will be a guy in outpatient whose wife is leaving him, whoâs obsessed with dating, finding an immediate replacement like days after she left him, which is like milliseconds really, heâs in a frenzy. I canât be like that. That pitiful. Itâs denial and itâs not healing. Although I look to women for comfort, attraction, a possibility of sex when itâs just a broken fantasy. A way of staying alive psychically?)
Why do I feel in that insane way my true potential is only accessible when I'm in a psychiatric hospital? Is that scary or what? Or sad? What about life on the outside, why can't it have this âflavorâ this wealth of insight, this haunting sense of the literary?
K.âs new areas of new brittleness. How can I predict where they are? Why do I step into them? No more I love yous.
Change in your actions, in your behavior, not merely in your words. How to show that in five days. Four days. How to show that in a confined space. How to show that without it being a manipulative attempt to shake her out of her brittle formality.
The DBT issue. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. The religion of Four Winds, the new hospital Iâm in which is much more civilized than Bassett was months ago. DBT is learning how to deal with overwhelming self-destructive emotions. Started out being applied to women with Borderline Personality Disorder, expanded to all kinds of other mental illnesses like bipolar, which I have. K gets mad when Iâm not making progress in DBT doctrine. âIf you're not married to me, what do you care how closely I adhere to the DBT doctrine?â
Let's see how thorough Martha the nurse is. Not very, it seems. They just gave me my diary card to fill out. Making the whole thing a little embarrassing when you go ask them to fill it out when that's what they told us to do. Tell you to do one thing, then flip it around so that you're wholly responsible. If that makes any sense.
Were those marker boards on the wall in the common room ever erased between 2008 when I was last here, and now? The ones reading âgoalsâ and âFamily education meeting.â in the common room.
Is discharge a good thing?
FUTURE PLANNING
CRISIS PREVENTION PLAN
-exercise
-keep doctors appointments
-attend self help groups
how I feel right now
-nervous about future
-comfortable in this unit, hospital
-sad about the separation, what this has all done to my family
What do I want to communicate when K and G get here? Do I want to evoke pity, or show how I'm getting better? It's easy to fall into a trap perhaps, of feeling like this mental health problem will never be solved, esp. since I've been in 3 hospitals so far. Thus, horror. When it might be brighter-sided to treat each one like the right move, each hospitalization was the best that we could hope for. Avoiding dying.
Comfort zone. Is it out of my comfort zone to project a vision of health or stability or healing? Ask about their hotel in Saratoga Springs, if they like their room. Beautiful day. L. just entered the room. She's oddly fascinating to me. Yesterday I gave her my squeezable stress star because she didnât have one, and tried to talk to her. I think she's something of an intellectual, but very nervous and inbent. Hence the fascination. Or something. Sudoku acolyte. Adherent. The quiet room on the other side of the building. You can overhear the nurses and mental health workers talking calmly to a patient who is slipping into volatile.
Is she my wife, or my exwife? How should I introduce her to people, if I do? Will she get upset at being called âmy wife?â What do I do? Just âK.â will be best, I think. Then I can defer to her to explain it to people, and feel my heart turn to dust when I hear her version of how she perceives things between us. When she speaks the words.
It is like suicide, not hugging you twice, killing off the old feelings, the goodbye kisses, the I love yous. But still she glances at me, raises her eyelids, signifying some ironic point. Her moues. The streams of changing female facial expressions I could read before but now itâs more puzzling and glyphic. I may be separated from her but I'll never be separated from her face. You'd have to gouge out my eyes. Or forbid me to see her. I want to hold onto at least that. Her facial expressions are like the rocks my ship is tossed onto. By some extended metaphoric wave. Somehow if I make her laugh enough she'll call all this off. The long intense hug. Right before I left for the hospital. It was the most I've gotten from her in a long time. Positive reinforcement? Should I threaten to go into the hospital more frequently, in order to get attention, pity, adoration, hugs?
I was moved from room to room just in time to miss the pantry duty that rotates. Maybe Iâll be circulated around Ferndell just one room ahead of pantry duty, avoiding the community chores like tidying the sink, washing dishes and putting bowls away, restocking small boxes of Frosted Flakes and Honey Nut Cheerios.
Our oxymoronic relationship:
friendly split
loving separation
amicable divorce
suicidal thoughts=like tinnitus. Tinnitus never goes away, must be ignored, must be adapted to. Find ways to live with it. Same with suicidal thoughts. Donât get pulled into their tractor beam.
10/3/10 Reading War and Peace againâhard to jump back into the story line. Who is Nikolay? Who are the Bolkonskys? The Rostovs? Some of the chapter endings are good, reminds be of Proust (as much as I can remember of Proust).
Social group therapy with another group of people from another building, Hathorn. All I can remember is this one guy from Hathorn macking on a female. Getting her number after saying in group that he respected his girlfriendâs new man. They have kids together. Heâs showing off his flexibility, his ability to adapt to his womanâs new reality. Showing off because it makes him more appealing to the women in the room with him now. Do they fall for it? I can see through his transparency, heâs trying to get laid. So would I if I could come up with a strategy? Later Iâll write a novel about a divorced guy pretending to be cool with his ex-wifeâs new husband but lining up to have the guy killed.
âDon't expect mindreading.â
âMy face is so swollen, it hurts.â
âThat's none of my business.â
âBut you wish it was.â
Hitch 22 was good. Hitchens can turn a phrase. I'm really trying to write. Its not easy in this posture. If all I can have is the sight of K., then that will have to be enough, or that will be a sort of lifeline, for my adrenaline to hang on, or whatever hormone or chemical is behind love. Feeling the feeling leave is the most painful thing.
[-establishing effective communication
-reasonable
-assertiveness
-listening
-body language
-eye contact
-posture
-tone
-boundaries
-patience
-tolerance
-empathy]
I haven't thought about K. with another man since I've gotten here. I'm feeling kind of a wave of secondary sadness (or perhaps tertiary) about this place. An impulse of mine is that I dont want to leave this comfort, or I hope I can stay for a while. Although as old people are discharged new people will be admitted who may be mean, etc. Pushing me out... the ones who came in before me and who'll stay after I'm dischargedâthey will bear the traces of me during my coin pass. Bearing true witness. Somehow. As opposed to brand new people who don't know me... âI wish you all the best luck...â âthe best of luck.â
My daughter's picture, from 2009, if you stare at it, all of her faces, past and future, loom out of the photograph at you. You can glimpse the young woman swimming inside the picture.
Next goal is I want to wash my clothes.
Dear Jesseâ
You know that you're in trouble. You don't drink anymore, but your situation is so chaotic and hopeless-feeling that it sometimes feels like there is no point in remaining sober. A big raison d'etre for being sober was to impress or frantically hold onto K. Now that is for the most part, gone. You have two tasks, at the least, to focus on. One is to be honest and realize how important it is to avoid drinking.
The other task is to make some kind of peace with the agents of sobriety in your life. Part of what led you to Four Winds was despair and exasperation at Billy's and Devon's words in AA back home, the way they lectured you like you were fresh off the streets when in truth your sober time swamped theirs, the way they didn't seem to respect your whole persona.
End of letter never sent to myself.
The Coin Pass. Youâre given a brass coin and the day before discharge thereâs an emotional meeting with your building where they pass the coin around and say nice things about you to give you strength. After the coin pass I'm left somewhat devastated. If forces you to say deep meaningful things about people you just met five days ago. And you get teared up and gag on your own words. What a ridiculous display. Then hugging Mallory when she clearly didn't want to be hugged. AWKWARDNESS! I guess I'll survive it tho. I suddenly feel really shy and ill at ease in my own skin. Like I want to disappear.
11/5/10
Always seem to be here in fall. Autumn leaves a changing mosaic revealing a message suggesting suicide.
Linda. Calling to control her whole family at home. I've come to grudgingly accept her foibles, her grating personality. Pauline, I don't know what i'm going to do if she gets discharged before me. She's too solid to disappear from my time here at Four Winds. Sheâs got charisma and leadership.
MY MOOD. The smallest things can alter my mood for the worse. Jeff and Mallory leaving affected my mood for the worse. It's not clear why, I just built up a dependence? A reliance on them? So that when they and Dennis left, it felt awful, there was no way to know what would happen next. So it's fear of the unknown that can affect my mood.
What is a mood swing? Have I ever had one? Would I even notice if I were having one? How much of my âmood disorderâ is just the way I am and it looks pathological when compared to my wife's mood patterns? i.e. anybody would look disordered next to here... Bitterness. At her emotional makeup.
When itâs time to report on goals I want to be able to say I met my goal â100%â later today. Instead of saying âmy goal is ongoing.â Something chilling and pitiful about that saying, although you are recognizing a resilience within you. My goal is ongoing. Maybe you didnât know how to set goals in the morning. They say depressed people canât set goals and this contributes to suicidality. There was one social worker whoâd come in and criticize peoples weak goal-setting in the morning. âI want to be happyâ is not a goal. Neither is âfinding peace.â Goals should be, what is it, SMART. [Something,] Measurable, Attainable, Reasonable, and Time-based. The patients hated this social worker for berating their shitty goals. I thought he was awesome and wanted to talk to him more, he was being kind of a jerk which might have been what all these self-absorbed mentally ill people kind of needed at times?
Moods. It's a word often used to reference to music = âsoft moodsâ not hard music. Moods are kind of soft and musical. Hard to describe.
Jill's impulsivity. She was a âfrequent flier,â sheâd been in Four Winds like twenty times. I can relate on one level = bad news makes her think of self-harm, suicide. I can relate, I feel like my suicidal thoughts are always on deck, always waiting for a situation to unleash them. And the divorce has definitely unleashed them. So is the suicidal episode just a response to the separation? The emotions tied into my doings with my wife. Her emotions on lock, inaccessible, held back. I want access to them, somehow they're valuable to me. Could it be I'm masochistic, wanting to bathe in her emotions? Is a mood a more fleeting thing vs. emotions longer-lasting things? Are moods responsible for those fleeting moments of tears or beauty I have? Somehow I think of moods as more kaleidoscopic. Impressionistic. Emotions are more clear? Moods are sprites. Emotions are dragons. Moods poems, emotions short stories. Then there is affect. The outward registration of moods and emotions. I wish I could summon up the literary mood, I want to be in that sublime chaos like Dec. 2008, the Otesaga. I was turning out poems left and write. Ok not poems but chunks of poetic language. âIn a bad mood.â A cosmic understatement. Funny how words cannot capture the whole universe contained within a mood. A mood is like a crack in the heart of a block of ice.
I have a sad fantasy of running off with a madwoman I suddenly have a strong emotional connection with. Or a psychiatric nursing student. (This will return again and again over the years.) And I can somehow solve all their problems. Calling her a madwoman is too much, let's say we agree on the real meaning of that word âmadâ or there are all kinds of madwomen. It's funny how there's that twinge of strange attraction in the face of totally, TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE odds. And in my mind I mentally have dated, shacked up with these women.
Looking from my daughter's pictures on the nightstand up to the mentally ill teenagers playing kickball outside my window. I donât stare, itâs just a glance for a few seconds. Although I people watch out windows in psych wards. Somehow I always seem to be seeing into a future, not the,but a . Mostly girls, not used to physical exertion/sports. Not that I was either as a teenager. The girls, some of them, appear to take a kind of quirky pride in being patients at a mental hospital. I wonder if old time âmad women,â young ones from other centuries, had a similar kind of self-regard. I'm sure some did. But them, treatment back then was nothing like what it is now. Perhaps a modern crazy girl can afford to be cheeky about itâshe's more likely to be treated.
When did everyone get so certain of things? Was I just the only one to miss that day of school? That is the reason why the world is so full of preachers and lecturers, and I've got LECTURE ME written on my forehead, forever. It's starting to get out of hand. Maybe it's because I talk about my own case too freely too openly with people, giving them a lot of subject matter with which to work. Clay to make into pots. Bad metaphor. But you know what I meanâsubstance to fuck around with. So I'm a sucker for telling my life story, all kinds of personal shit and then they run rampant all over me with their own psychological agendas. But I can't stop telling my story.
Awkwardness again after going into kitchen with J and P and started babbling about my daughter's nightmares. I'm angry that my daughter is having nightmares because of our separation and my hospitalization. She's been having nightmares for the past seven days. Angry because it's like this wouldn't be happening if it weren't for this separation. So I feel as if Kâs blaming me for something she started. Listen to the blame and childish logic oozing out of these words.
Dodging the female energy that courses back and forth in this unit. Getting in the way a little, then learning when to get out... Listening to some of these women bitch, and narrate their gripes and tell each other their problems. I can't help but think âclass issuesâ when I look and listen to a lot of these people. I'm just kind of waiting for the din to end.
See my poem âThe Hospital of Blocked Facesâ about the scariest patient there, the Xanadu woman. She brought her own copy of Xanadu on VHS and I was trapped in the TV room watching it with her, didnât want to get up and leave because I thought that would offend her. She was a true madwoman, one I didnât want to run away with. She had a thing with faces, the first day she arrived she burst into the common room and forced us to reveal our faces. To see if she recognized a former tormentor? PTSD? She was taken to the quiet room often. Anyway, watching Xanadu, she sang along with the songs. She was sitting in front of me facing the TV. I lightened up. I asked her if she liked roller skating. She turned aroundâI am still scared of her typing these wordsâand slowly wiped my face off my skull.