Psychiactric Hospital series: Part 1- The first days: Restarting the Race

Leaving the hospital is like being pushed off the dock on the start line of a rowing race. You use short, fast strokes to come to your balance and come to race speed, and only then do you slow down and lengthen your strokes for the duration of the race. Before the race starts, you know you have the skills and abilities to compete you have done the same things a thousand times in practice. Yet the nerves and pressure of the actual race change your initial response till you find the inner place of knowing your abilities and trusting that you can handle it. The first day and week out of the psychiatric hospital are the start of the race. Pushing open the door out of the hospital is adrenaline inducing, similar to the start of the race.  With that comes returns of the pressures of the race of the outside world-of life. The first afternoon when you get out, there is both this excitement of being out of the hospital and having your own space and being able to sleep in a completely dark room (#roomates, a story for another time, maybe.) Of course, you also get to choose what you want to eat for meals, which is a double-edged sword. While sometimes or even a lot of times the hospital food wasn't overly impressive, you were served three meals a day, without you having to do any thinking, shopping, and cooking. While I sometimes find cooking relaxing, the recreation of all the hospital structure immediately feels overwhelming, that hopefully turns into a small burn and then completely off, but being in a global pandemic doesn't help the process. One thing that came up right was having to organize my medications and set up timers to take my meds on time. In the hospital, we are given our medications at specific times without you having to do any thinking or preparation. You almost don't notice it anymore as you get used to the schedule of the hospital, but especially with the addition of an evening medication for me created an extra thing to remember that I struggled with for the first few days. Another internal struggle that arose in the first days out was the internal pull to two sides.  One to go back to the bubble of coloring and audiobooks in the hospital and the other side wanted to organize and get back to doing all the things I was doing beforehand. The balancing act is to keep rowing and change my behaviors as needed, as dictated by the race and my internal abilities. The art is understanding what my mental capabilities are each day if it's a day for a sprint or trying to keep rowing the race no matter how slow your strokes become. The first days pass in a blur like the start of the race sometimes, with the focus completely on finding the internal and external balance to rowing the race of life.

Musty boxes of my Mind

     I lock myself in the living room of my mind in the middle of the musty and rusted untouched boxes. The untouched boxes I don't want to touch but want to take them out to the curb. I then somehow still manage to ask myself why I am not able to dream about how I want the living room, forget the whole house of my mind to look like. Pen, paper, and words are tools the cleaner in my mind uses, and it creates a love-hate relationship, and when I run for too long from the pen with excuses it cracks the window to find the air. The air of letting go that comes from putting words on paper, I crave it but don't let myself indulge in opening up the boxes and letting go. Many of these boxes have labels. I have applied some of the labels and others have labeled some as well. These boxes are filled with kicking demons and muffled choking memories. I spend more time judging myself on having these boxes filling up the house, than giving myself the grace and space to unpack, process, and throw out the boxes. Holding myself back from opening up the room and letting light and growth into the room and turn my house into a home full of growth, dreaming, and achieving. I need to love myself and the dream house and world I want to create enough to sit through the painful process of emptying out the musty rotting boxes of pain. I notice this more when I turn away from letting myself write many times its because I'm struggling with processing old baggage that sometimes shows up in the same shabby box or gets a bit renovated for me, and instead of sitting an opening the box I try to just numb my mind and do mindless tasks. I'm trying to change this more so I can get to the place of visualizing, thinking and creating the home and world in my mind and in the world around me that I want.

The Fear of Always Being Broken

My first thought for the title of this post was "the fear of never getting back to being healthy". The major problem with this title that I found for me was that I have this illusion of healthy that I want to get back to. For me its the year 2015 I was living in Florida training for the Paralympics in rowing, that includes training twice a day most days and then even managing two semesters in community college. Now my mind like many minds likes to gloss over the weekends I spent curled up in my closet in this silent stunned dysfunction, freaking out from thunder sending my mind on loops about dying from some PTS after an incident in the summer war (that's a story for another time). While I was having fewer struggles with my binge eating disorders (partially because I wasn't fully aware of the depth of the issue) there were totally Friday binges and then Saturday and Sunday fasts. The problem that is created with cracking holes in my facade of the perfect year, is the feeling that comes from that, the feeling of having never actually been ok. This realization of never actually being ok before leads my mind down the rabbit hole of anxiety, always being broken, never being whole within myself. This leads to intense fear about a personal inability to be whole within me. It does release the idea of getting back to myself, which in some ways creates the opportunity to be better every single day, yet creates a larger fear of the unknown, and feeling like I have no idea what tools I need to get to this place of being not broken. In a way, this creates the necessity of being ok with being in a broken state while still working to no longer being in this state, which is rather hard to achieve. I'm not sure the fear will ever disappear, and I'm not sure it would be healthy for it to completely disappear,hopefully, I will at least learn better tools in which to function in the fear.