Tag Archives: sociology of psychiatry

I must have written this early in the morning of the day that I disappeared for several before New Year’s, finding myself in a bathtub at my dad’s house, trying to die on New Year’s Eve.  Does it give me any insight into why I disappeared?  Unfortunately not.  It’s interesting though…

3:44 am, Tuesday December 27, 2005

A rant.

The children are sleeping all safe in their beds and I’m sitting here paralyzed because I cannot figure out how to turn on my iRiver mp3 player.

I press the button that says “power” at least a hundred times.

I read the troubleshooting manual at least ten times.

I give up.  I want to break the little metal gadget into a thousand pieces using a hammer and a little adrenaline.

But of course one cannot do this, for it would render the tiny harddrive unreturnable.

So I sit here and loathe technology and loathe myself for being so incapable.

I sit here and think fondly of bed, but have no desire to lie down.

I am a bad person.

Not bad in the traditional sense.  I don’t throw garbage out into the streets, I vote, social injustices have brought me to tears, I’ve turned off the TV.

No, I am bad in a much subtler way.  I don’t care about myself as much as others care for me.  And I don’t care for you nearly as much as you care for me.

Not to say you wouldn’t have found yourself in the same predicament, anxious to explore the far reaches of your mind after an afternoon of shopping that was supposed to provide some sense of satisfaction, but instead made you embarassed, embarassed to show anyone how many clothes you’d bought and how nicely they would match your iRiver as you walk towards a seat on the bus.

Money.  Is evil, makes the world go round, is the root of all evil, is necessary.  I cringe thinking of future dealings I will be forced to have with this reified symbol of value.  I cringe thinking of the sixty-six dollars I will have to ask my father for tomorrow, my weekly allowance from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority.  Did I mention I’m insane?  I cringe thinking of meetings at banks, maximum-growth savings accounts, GICs, RRSPs.  I want out but out is not an option.  I was born into this system, and by this system I will die.

I suppose the mention of insanity perked up your ears or your eyes or whatever sense organ you are absorbing this rant through.  Only 20% of psychiatrists agree with each other on a given diagnosis.  So I’ve been given a number of trophies for my deviation from sanity.  Borderline personality disorder, anxiety disorder, major depression, bipolar disorder, schizotypal disorder, obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

I agree with each of these diagnoses.  They reference pages in the bible of psychiatry upon which descriptions of the various “disorders” are given.  And each of those pages describes me to a T.  I’m even getting a study grant from the government because of my madnesses, and would encourage you to step up to the plate – you never know what seemingly insignificant idiosyncracy could earn you a couple grand in grants or bursaries.

Embrace your neuroses!  Make love to your psychoses!  Then turn around and quietly laugh at that man on the bus with untied shoelaces who is having a loud conversation, with himself.

Functional-crazy.  That’s what it’s all about.

You put your left hand in, you pull your left hand out, you put your left hand in and you shake it all about.  Do you know who you’re voting for this January?

You’re about to be exposed to one belief I hold that may offend you: democracy doesn’t work.

Most of us won’t be voting for anyone, as we know which neighbourhoods corresspond with certain political parties.  Those of us who do vote will not vote for the candidate we like the most, but for the candidate we loathe the least.  Stephen Harper looks like an alien from planet G94/B, Paul Martin looks like he’s had an eyebrow lift, Jack Lleyton is a smaller man with a mustache.  And then there are those crazy separatistes in Quebec.  Looks like Mr. I Can’t Stop Opening my Eyes this Wide will win.

4:17 am now.  I have a vast array of tranquilizers and downers that could put me fast to sleep but I leave them on the shelf.

I refuse to sleep until this iRiver turns on.

I refuse to eat until I am unhealthy looking, a look I pull off well.

In high school the cold, veiny hands of a girl with bad circulation were endearingly termed, “Jen hands”.

And you expect me to be a good person?

To watch the evening news, to take it seriously?  To take economics or commerce or business because I will surely find my dream job within one of those disciplines?  To refuse Joe the dealer, when he shows up at my doorstep with his kool-aid green hair flying in all directions?

I’d rather be sent to the principal’s office, just one more time.  For laughing too hard or crying too hard, for distracting the teacher or distracting my peers, for yelling too loud or refusing to speak.  I would sit in that principal’s waiting area, palms sweaty, eyes darting around, stomach acid churning.  A disappointed glance and a call home to mom and dad.  Same thing every time, so why do I still get nervous?

The worst punishment I ever endured was a few days off school during which I drove around the city with my ne’er do well friends and smoked drugs.  Of course, I was thinking about the implications of my actions the whole time.  The implications were – nothing!  I was just a certain woman or man’s favourite underling to make an example of.  Arsonist, smoker, junkie, counterfeit artist, vandal, stoner, scrapper – just like those pages of the psychiatrist’s bible, I could be described by many unsavoury terms.  Now look what will happen to you if you venture out into that territory.

4:32.  Time goes fast for a little while and then slows back down, sometimes so much that it seems the clock is ticking backwards.  Right now it proceeds at a normal speed, simply stating the strange hour that is upon me, reminding me that good citizens will be getting up for their morning runs in one hour, reminding me that I stopped going to bed at a reasonable hour almost a decade ago.  It never mattered anyways.  I would always be exhausted in the morning, whether I’d had eight or three hours of sleep.  What difference does it make?  Does it make you nervous to imagine writing that final exam after only three hours of sleep?  Well then you probably won’t do very well, being so nervous and all.

4:37.  It sounds like a flight – flight 437 from Vancouver to Winnipeg, from Tokyo to Vancouver, from Melbourne to Tokyo, then back again.  My father spent six months in Europe when he was my age and has sworn off travelling since.  I guess he was disillusioned somehow.  Whenever I’ve travelled I’ve departed this strip-mall sea of a city with absolutely no expectations, so I’ve always had a great time, too great, I’ve always wanted never to return home, where things are like this, where things are just so.

4:41 and I can feel the bags forming underneath my eyes, but it doesn’t matter because in my bag I have M.A.C. hyperreal foundation 300 and a tube of mascara that could make your heart break.  I can look beautiful falling apart, like the ruins of Babylon or something like that, that likening myself to shows my heinousness.

I’ve been careful lately to apply eye-liner and lipstick.  Doing little things like putting on make-up make us feel better about ourselves.  Take care of yourself.  I never was too good at that, but I’m getting better, says #240 “pink freeze” eyeshadow.  I’m getting better.

Better enough to go to school in less than ten days.  I wish I could tell you that I have my notebooks ready, my books purchased, my schedule memorized.  I wish that were me but it is not.  I won’t know what time my first class is until the day of, and I’ll shove some lined paper into a bag, and miss the first bus because I’m looking for a pen.  And I’ll get through the work, get top marks, clinging on to success with the tips of my fingers, looking down at failure and wishing I could just let myself drop into the abyss of not caring.  I pretend not to care but that’s an easy one – you know I care, if I didn’t maybe I would have gotten through registration day without crying.

Bureaucracy makes me ill.  Vomiting would have been more a propos than crying, but I’m a slave to my body’s involuntary reactions.  I haven’t been able to vomit for a long time.  Even when I’ve been deathly ill I’ve still had to force it out, sticking two fingers down my esophagus.  I miss being able to puke without such prodding.

New Year’s Eve is in four days.  It always messes me up to think about where I was last New Year’s and where I am now.  It’s one of those few times you have two clear reference points and can trace how one year influenced the next year, but in so many more ways than you could have imagined.  At the same time you can view what was so very important to you one year means nothing to you now.  Don’t shed a tear, I’m not trying to be sentimental, fuck, anything but sentimental, I’m only looking at the start from the finish line.  Out of breath and wild-eyed.  Heaving.

I never won a race and I quit every type of lesson I embarked upon before the third session, so I was never given ribbons or trophies of any sort.  I received the highest mark in my grade almost every year, so I was given a certificate and a scholarship.  But academics aren’t like sports or boy scouts or camp, no one stands cheering you on, and no one hears your name for it is said quietly, it is not yelled.

I would prefer for my name to be said quietly though.  Yelling is loud and tacky, especially when he or she who yells feels it necessary to add on a bunch of syllables to the name they shout.  Like ______________ _________.  That’s not my name.  My name is ___.  I was born in the eighties and my parents were unoriginal.

5:04 am.  Winter provides me with soothing darkness at this earlyist of hours.  But the days are already growing longer, a little longer each day until the light at 5:04 am is blinding.  Not tonight.  Tonight I may lay under the covers after taking a cocktail of pills and feel quite safe.

My favourite instant is that when you turn out the last lamp and for a few seconds there is only blackness.  Quickly things take back their form and place, but for an instant they didn’t exist.  I didn’t exist.  No, that’s wrong, if I didn’t exist there would be no blackness.

5:09 am.  I wonder how much longer I could keep typing for.  I wonder when it would stop making sense, or if it already has.  I wonder what tomorrow will bring, probably nothing worth speaking of in a week.  I should really take the pills I was supposed to take almost twelve hours ago now, the chemicals that make me sleep.

Lately it’s hardly sleep though, just nightmares and waking up in cold sweats.  Nightmares that Josh is still here, that you said ‘no’, that I forgot the wrong thing at the wrong time and thus will cease to live.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this last night of casting off random words and thoughts into the void.  Of course I’ve learned nothing, of course I’m not done yet.  But done is being forced upon me by the concerned citizens close to me, and we never really learn, we are just given ideas to ponder in the hope that maybe, just maybe, someday we’ll come up with one of our own.

Clocks are tripe, time is meaningless.  Good luck convincing them of that one.  Just take your pills, five down the hatch and one up the ol’ nose.  How I do enjoy sucking foreign substances up into my nostrils through a straw-type instrument.  How far we are apart from one another, how much you will never understand about me, how much I will never understand about you.  How close we are to one another, trudging through the same snow, walking over that same path day after day.  And I don’t even know your name.  One of my biggest problems is that I don’t know how or when to stop.  When funny’s become absurd, when philosophy’s become a rant, when a rant’s become an evening and the evening’s almost over.

How could I ever have a family, children of my own?  How could I raise them, seeing the chaos that underlines each second of our being?  I gather I could do quite well, but I would never be called a good mother.  The good mothers would feel little shocks of superiority every time I walked past and gave them an opportunity to sneer.  Bad bad bad.

If bad and good are really all we’re made of, I’ve got something else coming to me.  But fuck, I may take drugs from strangers and dance the night away instead of studying, but I walk to school and I don’t go to Starbucks and I don’t even have TV.

I suppose good is the norm, and the norm always tends towards mediocrity.  I suppose bad is the unknown, and the unknown is not governed by the rules of statistics.  The unknown is all we have.  No, we don’t have time, and we hardly have space.  We don’t know.  I don’t know.  You don’t know.  Nobody knows.

And that makes life worth a little more.  Each answer is echoed by a new question, and that makes us infinite.  Infinite ugliness, infinite beauty, infinite sound and infinite light.  I only wish I could know how the story ends.

I suppose it ends happily ever after.