I washed my pixie cut with a bar of soap the entire time in the ward.
Not nice soap, the absolute most default hospital bathroom type bar soap.
Why? Well for starters I was too raving mad planning for the end times to yield to this fake society telling me to clear. Also, when I regained humanity, I felt horrible for how I treated my dad and didn't want to bark at him anymore asking for shampoo.
He brought me stuffed toys and a cactus, the things that suprisingly, turned out to be the biggest comforts to a broken mind through those shivering glowing green nights.
Months later when I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, I see how awkwardly that cut has grown out. It is almost like my short hair was made for survival in the jungle.
Weirdly for the longest time, I experienced other bodily issues when I wasn't well. Maybe its tmi but I experienced the most dastardly constipation right as I went manic. Absolute most horrific sort of pain.
When I was still 'sane' I had forgotten to eat well. What was I thinking, did I eat crackers but not vegetables? I can't remember. Then, the stress? What is it. I wish It was one thing. It was trauma over my mum dying, the major factor duh. Somehow my body destroyed itself, man it is weird to just beg for a normal digestive system.
When I was acute in the ward, which equates to the first few weeks, I thought the constipation was some proof of a divine sisterhood with other women. When a woman my age was whispering at the counter, I assumed she was also constipated for...whatever manic reasons I did. As you might guess by now, the manic/psychotic mind is infinite.
She screeched at me. Lines either ranging from 'spastic twat' and 'eat shit'. She was most likely one of most who were in for drug induced psychoses.
Maybe it will take many years of hard work, before people listen to my description of the world between bars.
When I entered, I was acute. I assumed everyone had a meaning and gloriously godly connection to me, or they were the evil 'system'. I asked one inmates what he was in here for. He was a young guy, and not jittering with withdrawals like the rest of the losers I saw.
'I prefer not to say.'
And crossed his arms, smiling back beneath his thick brown beard.
Why was I there? I was God. The other inmates were unlike me. They demanded smokes and watched the tele without delusions. This is what confuses and enrages me about our systems for mental health.
I couldn't even lock my bedroom door, because I flushed the key card down the toilet, believing they were tracking us. Welp I had no security for 5-6 weeks and by the end of it, I was very eager to not have my laptop accessible to all the captured druggies of Adelaide.
Why were these people were there? Some of them may have been suicide cases, needing a monitored bed. Ah. It is so sad, isn't it? Isn't the hospitalised, whether suicidal or psychotic, so sad to imagine? Well, its sadder than whatever you are imagining.
For some reason in my later weeks in the ward, I lay in my bed at 8pm and begged for sleep. On the dot at 8pm, akathisia happened. On top of that, there was the brutal weight of a world slowly returning to me.
How many more words. How many more can help explain.
I don't know what most experienced to end up in a ward, but it sure as heck wasn't my screaming, flinging, fighting, scratching, running, escaping, rock throwing, nurse punching, needle ripping wild rage.
The raw emptiness clutching at rough white hospital sheets, and crying. Wondering what has happened. To see the other side of hell only to be told to move on.
It isn't sudden like snapping out of a bad dream, oh you're so lucky for that. It is a slow journey. A waking up. Fading from this fear to gradually smiling again. It is growing my hair our.
My hair growing longer looks a bit daggy. My bangs are parted in the middle which isn't a look I can pull off. Still, it is a perfect reminder.
Scrubbing the bar soup in my the short hair was maybe the peak expression of hospitalised derangement. As it grows, I forget that person.
I don't always want to admit that person was me. She is, and part of giving psychotic disorder sufferers more pride, is letting them assimilate these memories back into the context of reality. In short, let us talk about it.
Oh whatever, nobody reads this.
As one inmate playfully said to me...
'We all end up in a ward at least once in our life....at least you've gotten yours over with so early."
Ah but it has aged me so.