Let Me Get Better

My eating disorder, for whatever reason, got worse after Ernie and I started dating. I ended up in the emergency room with heart palpitations. The doctor was incredibly mean to me. She took one look at me and said and snapped, “You’re underweight and malnourished. Do you have a drug problem?”

I told her, “No, I don’t do drugs.”

“Is there a reason you’re so thin?”

“I don’t know…I’m never hungry.”

“Eat anyway,” she snapped.

“I try to. My stomach hurts when I eat anything. It hurts when I drink water.”

“I pulled your records. You’re a psych patient. You being treated for the psych issues?”

I tried to explain that I’d stopped going to psych doctors because they made me feel worse.

“I’m doing better now that I’m off all the drugs,” I explained.

“You don’t look like you’re doing better.”

I was so frustrated. I felt so trapped. I started to cry. “I know what’s real and what isn’t now,” I sobbed. “I’m not on edge all the time. I can think things through. I’m only like this right now because I’m so stressed out all the time.”

“And what are you stressed over?” this woman was so irritable with me, like I was wasting her time.

I put my head in my hands and cried harder. “My family,” I cried. “They fight all the time. With me, with each other. Nobody is ever just calm.”

She wasn’t listening. Nobody was listening.

Now, I have admitted to you all the times that I flew off the handle and behaved outrageously. If I had lost my shit in this emergency room, I would admit it.

But I didn’t. I cried very hard and asked her to please listen to me. But I wasn’t screaming. I wasn’t trying to get up out of the bed. They still had a bunch of wires on me, checking my heart.

She told me she was going to sedate me.

“No! For what? I’m not doing anything! I’m talking to you.”

“You’re hysterical.”

“I’m not! I’m sad and frustrated. Everybody acts like I’m so crazy. I’m trying to get better. I’m trying to do the right thing.”

Two nurses came in. One held me down and the other inserted an IV into me.

It didn’t take long before the effects of the IV hit me. While the world was so slow and my body was so heavy, they brought a clipboard to me with a piece of paper.

“Sign this.”

“No.” I heard the way my words slurred. “I’m not signing anything. You…wrong.”

A nurse put a pen in my hand, held it, and hastily scribbled on the paper.

“You can’t..”

I stopped fighting.

Just like with my grandparents, I stopped fighting.

I had to stop talking so much. I had to stop letting people see I was struggling. Because they wanted me to fail. They wanted me to stay messy. They didn’t want to hear me.

I was going to withdraw as much as I could. From my family, from the people around me.

The more open and genuine I was, the more power they had to hurt me.

This doctor didn’t want to hear me.

I was powerless. I couldn’t admit I was struggling, because they would use it to hurt me, to keep me in the house with my grandparents who fought and picked at me, and my grandfather who shoved me and hit me. They would put me back on the drugs that made it so I hardly knew what I was doing and everything felt like it was moving so fast all the time. They would keep me in this place where I felt so out of control.

If I let them see that I was struggling, I would never stop struggling.

Because they wouldn’t let me.

Therapy is not the answer.

Doctors are not the answer.

They will hurt you. They will not help you get better.

Not if you are severely mentally ill like me.

They will make you feel small. They will not allow you a say in your own treatment. If your family abuses you, they will assume everything you say is a delusion-a symptom of your illness. They will not help you become independent so you can escape them. They will do the opposite. They will push you to be more dependent on them. They will talk to your abusers as if they are so reasonable, and you are so horrid and small.

Therapy and drugs kept me sick. It kept me small.

I will never ever go to a psychiatrist again. I would kill myself before that happened, and I mean that quite literally.

Being alive and at the mercy of psych doctors, being pumped full of drugs, is no life worth living.

If I’m ever so sick that I’m a danger to myself, I’d much rather be a danger to myself and never EVER go through any of that again.

One thing I learned from this ER visit, was that I had to stop seeing doctors for physical reasons too. I still avoid the doctor. I don’t trust any of them for a second.

The next time that I had heart palpitations, I crawled into my closet, held my chest and waited for it to stop.

I told myself, I’d rather die on the floor of this closet than keep being treated like I’m so evil and wrong. I’m trying to get better. I wish everyone would let me get better.