The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

by Emilie Autumn

if this is a manic state, then why isn’t it any fun, because it used to be, or maybe it didn’t and I just said it was after the fact because I thought that’s what people wanted to hear, that at least I wasn’t suicidally miserable all the time, that for a month out of every year I really was fun without faking it, that I really, really was and so you shouldn’t be afraid to love me because I won’t always be like this, and my body is starting to shake and I have that awful feeling of jumping out of my skin chest tingling throat choking on my own nervousness and my body feels wrong and my brain is buzzing and I feel sick and the key the key the key I go to check the time but my cell phone is dead or did it just become overwhelmed and annoyed by all of the crazy energy that is pouring out of me and simply decide to check out and I wish I could check out as easily as my phone can and then I realize that there are no cell phones and that this technology won’t exist for another hundred years and I see now that the reason I live in the Victorian era on paper is that then as now when you’re a girl with depression manic or otherwise you’re on your own and all of the attempts at mental health care are nothing but a shabby façade and I’m filled with so many truths right now and it hurts hurts hurts and I want more lies and I’m peeling the tissue paper I’m scribbling upon into three transparently thin sheets for more space on which to write words that don’t matter and my hand hurts from...