My First Hospitalization

I guess it’s time for me to talk in more detail about the mental hospital stays.

Before I get started, I want to reiterate my position: if you are not severely mentally ill and have never been in-patient, if you have much more manageable mental health issues, such as depression or anxiety, then I’d like you to keep your advice to yourself.

It’s like this: I wouldn’t go giving a schizophrenic advice. Because they are (usually) much more severely mentally ill than I am. It just does more harm than good to go around believing you can give advice to people who have lived a totally a different life than you and manage a much more severe chronic illness than you do.

That being said, if you’ve been in-patient AND you have delusions or BPD, go ahead and pop off to your heart’s content.

I just can’t stand that smug shit from people who have never seen the side of the psych industry that I have.

Like really, Becky? HAVE you had good experiences in therapy? Did they teach you all about gratitude and mindfulness to help you manage your Seasonal Affective Disorder? I’m so fucking happy for you. I’ll be over here reeling from my last delusion. NO, 40 minutes of chatting with a counselor and an adult coloring book aren’t gonna fucking cut it for me. So, if you’re not at my level of crazy, please keep your opinions to yourself. They irritate the hell out of me. If I was gonna do a woke, I might call it a “microaggression.” You know how damn tiring it is being told you don’t know what’s best for yourself? Being talked down to for attempting to advocate for yourself and have a say in your own treatment? First by doctors, then by your family, and then by random assholes on the internet?

Like, I have a dozen in-patient stays under my belt. Years of drugs and therapy and DBT and AA and everything else you can think of.

If you think YOU are gonna be the one to fix me with a comment on a wordpress blog, that’s just a level of self-important fuckery I’m not prepared to deal with. Same with the people who pipe up on Twitter. I’m not on Twitter anymore, but still. You think you can give any substantial help in 140 characters then you’ve really been sniffing your own farts too hard and should probably go get some fresh air.

I’m tired, y’all.

I think a lot of mentally ill people get tired of other people talking over them, pressuring them to be okay (even though it’s a chronic illness), and pushing them to get better the “right” way. It’s exhausting.

Be a decent human being. Keep it to yourself.

As wild as I act, there are actually people in my life who look out for me. Nobody on the internet has the responsibility or the ability to give me real help. So save me the frustration of dealing with the weird attempts.

Okay, first hospitalization ever.

I was 14.

My grandfather had been getting physical with me for years. He’d hit my grandmother in front of me several times. At this point in my life, I think I hated him more than any other human on the planet. My mom was always more violent. Her violence was always more serious. He rarely actually injured anybody. But, he’d taken away from me the one safe place in my life. Nan and Papa’s house had been the safe and happy part of my life. Until he let the mask slip. He hit Nan in front of me and my sisters. He started hitting me after this, because I started snapping at him and calling him names all the time. I hated him for making Nan look so ashamed in front of us.

Before that, I was actually pretty close with my grandfather. When I was really little, he used to tell me ‘Princess Jennifer’ stories. These were stories about an alternate version of me, who was, you guessed it, a princess. Sometimes the Princess Jennifer stories would continue from one night to the next, like a serial fiction. When he put me in bed at night, he did this thing he called a ‘1-2-3.’ He would pick me up and swing me back and forth over the bed and go “One! Two! Three!” and on three he would drop me in the bed.

When I was seven or eight, I sat on his lap and he pulled out this photo album. He showed me pictures of himself when he was in the army and he told me a lot of (kid friendly) stories about the army.

He played Barbies with me and Carly.

He took us for long walks in the woods by his house.

He brought us to Castle Park after school.

He taught me how to ride a bike when I was 4. It was a bike with training wheels, but I was still super proud that my papa had taught me to ride a ‘big girl bike.’

He was this fun, loving grandpa.

Until he wasn’t.

Until he hit Nan in front of me, and I never never stopped hating him for it.

And then he started hitting me.

And then both the little gray house and the big gray house were full of fighting and screaming and hitting. Before that day when I was eleven, the big gray house was safe.

Then it wasn’t safe.

It was like a switch flipped. I became so angry. It bubbled and bubbled for a long time.

I don’t know why that day when I was 14 was so different from every other day. By that point in time, he was in the habit of getting right up in my face to scream at me and intimidate me. Usually if I shut up and “didn’t say anything smart” he wouldn’t hit me.

I couldn’t fall in line that day.

I was so angry. It wasn’t right that he tried to keep me quiet by keeping me scared. I was so sick of being scared.

In this flash, before I really had time to think about it, there he was shouting and implying potential violence with is body language and I just felt this decision zap though me like, “I’d rather get hit than stand here scared.”

And I fucking attacked him.

I barely got in one swing.

My grandfather is a big man, and we’re not talking a guy in his 80s. My mom was barely out of high school when I was born. My grandfather was in his 50s then. He wasn’t a feeble old grandfather. He was still young(for a grandfather) and still very able-bodied. He’s over six feet and even in his 50s, he was in-shape. He isn’t any more. But back then he was.

I threw my entire body at him, a whirlwind of fists and limbs, and I barely connected even one time, before I was up in the air. He ripped me off the ground and slammed me into the floor. Then he kicked me as hard as could (or at least that was what it felt like) a number of times. I didn’t go down easily. I got up once during this and tried to hurl myself at him again. There was a soda on the table. I threw it at his face and he ended up doused in coke. This prolonged the entire ordeal, because obviously it pissed him off. It was worth it though. Knowing that he had to drive home sticky and wash all that soda off himself was a victory that I held onto.

Eventually, he stopped attacking me and my whole body hurt, so I didn’t lunge at him again.

He went outside. I went to my room. I put the mattress in front of the door.

And I broke every fucking thing in my room.

When the police came, I was the one who was screaming and hysterical.

And the adults were so calm and reasonable.

I hated them so fucking much for being so calm and reasonable.

I hated how trapped I felt. How I had to constantly be on alert, and everything I did was wrong.

I tried to protect my nan and then she was mad at me and blamed me for how angry papa was. I tried to protect my sisters and I never really could. I could distract my mom. I did a lot of the time.

But I’ll tell you truth.

I didn’t always send them away and distract her.

Sometimes I let her go for them and was just glad it wasn’t me. I’d think “I always distract her from you guys. You can take it this time.”

When other adults weren’t around, everyone in my family was screaming, hysterical, shrieking, throwing, breaking, threatening. One wrong word and a bad moment would happen. Everything always felt so taut, like a guitar strong about to snap. So that even when things were okay, my heart was always pounding hard. I was always on alert.

Then this day came and I was the snapped guitar string. I was hysterical, and they were so calm and reasonable.

My grandfather knew the cop.

A poker buddy.

The way they talked to each other made me sick. It made me want to rip my eyeballs out of my skull. I couldn’t believe I was the one who was wrong. I tried so hard so hard so hard to deal with them. And then I was the crazy one. I was the crazy one.

I’m still so angry about it sometimes. The way nobody in the hospital listened to me.

“I have the bruises here. Look! It’s always like this! My family is crazy!”

But I was the one the police found in a pile of broken glass from the mirror I’d broken, with all my stuffed animals torn apart with my bare hands. There was cotton balls and shredded stuffed animal skin and little beaded eyes everywhere. I was the one covered in cuts and I was the one put screaming into an ambulance. I couldn’t stop screaming. I was so SO angry. It wasn’t even an emotion. It was like this FORCE ripping through me. I felt like a firehose or something. Just this thing this incredible burst of anger was tearing through. I couldn’t stop it. I felt like I’d tear my skin off or something if I didn’t keep screaming.

I wasn’t the perfect, polished little victim.

But do you think I didn’t try to be? Do you think I’d never told anyone what was going on in my house? CPS, well DYFS is what it’s called in Jersey, they had reports on us.

None of that mattered once I stopped being calm, even though nobody else was calm.

So I had my first psych eval in the ER. the first of many. It was horrible.