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Maybe I’ll call it nothing. An unnamed something that I occasionally write in. I like that better. Once you name something, it stops you seeing the whole of it, or why it matters.
I’m only going to write positive, happy, normal thoughts. No crazy thoughts allowed.
It’s odd how quickly one adapts to the strange new world of a psychiatric unit. You become increasingly comfortable with madness—and not just the madness of others, but your own. We’re all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.
‘You don’t need to be mad to work here, but it helps’?”
“It means I think Freud was wrong about a couple of things. I don’t believe a therapist can ever really be a blank slate, as he intended. We leak all kinds of information about ourselves unintentionally—by the color of my socks, or how I sit or the way I talk. Just by sitting here with you, I reveal a great deal about myself. Despite my best efforts at invisibility, I’m showing you who I am.”
“The problem is we’ve become so risk averse, we’d rather overmedicate than take any chances. We need to be brave enough to sit with the madness, to hold it—instead of trying to lock it up.”
We do not have the power over life and death. Alicia Berenson wanted to die. At some point she was bound to succeed.
