The first day, early morning

I wake up to lights in my face again. Right in my eyes, beaming back through a crack in my head. This is at least the eighteenth time they’ve come by in one night. I’m counting them like sheep to pass the time as they cycle in, their voices changing every couple hours.

I don’t know what time it is, but I’m hoping it’s close to 6:00 a.m. so I can stop putting on the sleep charade. The hard plastic of the bed wrinkles below me as I crash sideways, grunting, trying to avoid the migraine-inducing hit to the eyes again, hoping that it communicates to them that rest is still important, even here. I hit the pillow too, only serving to hurt my hand.

“Stop!” I plea. “Do you really have to do that? Please close the door. Please stop.” But they still make their rounds, constantly, to shine the spotlight on my weak frame and splitting head slouched sideways into this overbeaten pancake mattress.

The fluorescent lights here are either off or on, and they’ve decided to keep them on tonight, surrounding me in the dull aqua that saturates the rooms, the hall, the scrubs, everything here. This color smells like mothballs and cardboard somehow — the blue version of prison pink.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”

I’m confused — am I alive or dead? The drugs are muddling my consciousness, giving a death-like softness to perception. But hardness and glare of every surrounding surface feel like reality continually hitting me in the face. Plus, I’m starving because there’s no gluten-free food for me, a celiac, in this place, a hospital. The hunger itself is crazy, bringing desperate shaking to every sob.

I fall back asleep for a short time, my whole body weak from crying, malnutrition, and trazodone. “It does make you a little dizzy,” a nurse said glibly last night when I asked why I felt so bad. No mention of the suicidal ideation that landed me here the night before. It’s hard to get people to mention things as they are, I’ve noticed. I’m getting used to it: The new pills are going to help.

The second day, early

A thin, blonde nurse wakes me up completely for my thyroid pills. She’s the picture of health and neurotypicality and everything I’m not. She chirps about an exciting, busy day as if that would excite me after the night I had. “You might even get some visitors today!” I mutter back something inconsequential, walking away.

I wander to the bathroom to look at myself after a night of crying, ready to practice my Joker-like smile for the visitors. When I cry, my eyes are green temporarily, and I like that. Something about how red and pink contrast with hazel.

I look gaunt, desperate, reminding me of how I skulked around high school at 97 pounds: the listless despondency that I saw again, looking back at me and sinking with every smile. “Prison hot,” I think to myself, practicing my "Kubrick stare," masochistically enjoying this for myself. I lost weight here too — looks like five pounds in two days. My parents will notice this I bet and compliment me. I get word that they’re waiting to see me just minutes later: They couldn’t wait.

Twenty minutes later, I’m heading down the hallway to the visiting room. My new friend is screaming again, so they ordered someone to watch him all day, even in the bathroom. I feel for him but try to shrug it off as best I can. Maybe I’m also schizophrenic too, and they don’t want to tell me. Perhaps I’m having an episode.

I nudge the door open slowly, anticipating their fear. Maybe they’re looking for a cut somewhere or bruising. Something more hideous than the despair of my hollowed-out eyes. That’s not enough to get it. “Maggie, are you feeling OK today?” comes from voices Appalachian-adjacent and sweet. An explanation that “depression runs in the family and that everyone-gets-down-sometimes” followed by this:

“Dear-god-I-hope-they-don’t-put-you-on-those-meds-they’ll-make-you-fat.”

The tone softens, and a genuine apology comes out next: “I’m sorry you got the worst and the best genes you could get simultaneously. We make beautiful, smart people who suffer so much. I’m so sorry that I said that prayer was enough for me to get over it. I’m happy you’re trying medication: I think it will help you. Maybe prayer will too, but that’s not for us to decide.”

Seems nice enough. I was 14 when I first felt this way and would have told them more if I knew this was the reception I’d get. They bring cards from their church that I decide I’ll read later. I leave them there, encouraged and actually nod at a couple of people as I walk back to my room, a weight lifted.

The second day, afternoon

At least they let us nap here, so I get a good hour in after lunch and feel better. I might not be alive but that’s OK. My feet, jittering from hunger, find the floor and I pull out the cards. I’m surprised by how many people wrote.

“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies ... my cup runneth over.”

Some vague apologies: the church camp roommate who punched me in the face for using big words; the boys (now men) who called me ugly; the girls who labeled me a freak. The lady who made me go to “Hell House” instead of Halloween. The youth pastor who chastised me for wearing sandals, accusing me of leading him to sin from my front-row seat of that packed youth group. It’s all here. I’m glad to hear it. Validate me and make me prosocial, popular.

I venture out briefly to check out the group meeting I was practically pushed to attend, only to be stopped by overwhelming sensory overload. The acrid smell of insufficient hygiene, the glare of the overhead lights interrogating me, the screaming from the next room, all of it. Leaning towards alive if I have to guess right now. Why: I’m uncomfortable.

Alive, alive, alive through the synthetic light and organic stench. Finally, I find the group meeting, glance through the small door window and sigh when I see that the chairs are full, at least 50 people, a nightmare for me usually, but it’s worth seeing what they have to say.

I open it to more surprises that defy logic. A smattering of friends and acquaintances, mostly not exactly current, randomized, circle the room like this is some AA meeting. I fawn: “Heeyyyy, gurl! Nice to see you. We’re here to make amends. We all have our reasons. Just listen. We heard that you might have died and needed to get some things off our chest.”

Here are the highlights:

• “I apologize for calling you dumb in school. I can see now though what you’ve accomplished that it’s not true. I shouldn’t have said it.”
• “I’m so sorry I triggered you with my talk of weight even though my own body is significantly thinner. That was fucked up.”
• “I’m sorry I called you the ‘weird friend,’ ‘the quirky friend,’ etc. The 'curvy friend.' I didn’t realize at that time that I was tokenizing you. I’ve learned some new vocabulary about social justice and stuff: I know you’re into that.”
• “I’m sorry I call myself an empath but in doing so, make everything about me and how I process your precious information and experiences.”
• “I’m insecure and have projected the very few feelings of significance I have onto you.”
• “I’m sorry I said you weren’t a ‘good fit’ for the team. It was actually me who was a complete fraud, and I shouldn’t have fired you.”
• “I shouldn’t have said your poems weren’t good: I heard you were published.”
• A chorus of this: “Sorry for being shallow and narrow-minded and not seeing the good in you.”
• And of this: “I value our friendship. I want you to be part of our friend group. Part of us. Part of what we’re doing and talking about. Our laughter. Our fun. No longer on the fringe.”

Finally. Some validation. Life is not quite good, but it is kind — the opposite of the usual, I’m thinking.

The third day

“Rise and shine!” feels uniquely punishing after a rotating cast of characters shone lights into your eyes at all hours, but they seem to love saying it.

After hours of restless coloring and crossword puzzles, I get a knock on my door. “Come in!” This time I’m not faking excitement. “Hey, Maggie. I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear that we’re currently evaluating whether or not to release your psychiatric hold, and it’s looking good.”

I ask them how they know someone’s ready to go home or not. “Well, that’s just the thing. We have designated people observing your progress as you’re here,” she says. That seems normal enough, reasonable.

The nurse draws me into yet another brightly lit room, but this one smells better. Seated at every angle is someone from the medical team, and the most austere eyebrows narrowing from the head of the table. They mutter my patient number and some brief notes about my medical history and repeat the same bullshit refrain that this is stemming from, in their words, “garden-variety anxiety.” Those three words, a throat punch. “But I was suicidal,” I offer, and they scoff.

Adrenaline kicks in and I pretend to perk up and decide it’s question time for my new audience: “Who were all those people visiting me? Like, in my room and group therapy?”

The doctor looks at me, chilled. “You had no visitors, Maggie. No one other than the doctors and nurses.”

“I almost died, and nobody close tried to stop me.” — Megan Thee Stallion

I decide not to retort because I want so badly to get out. A nurse leaves to check the visitor log from Floor 13, as she calls it, the psych ward floor. Minutes later, she comes back to restate that my section was empty and that the team had phoned my parents to come pick me up.

When they arrive, they review my notes with my family, explaining the new medications and how I, well, behaved. I want to get out of here before I start crying in some way that incriminates me.

“And... You did visit me, didn’t you?” I manage to ask my mother.

She walks up, immediately starting with this again: “Looks like you have some new meds called antipsychotics to take on top of your SSRI. I hope you don’t have to take them for long because they make some people overweight and numbed out. You don’t want to get fat on top of losing your personality!”

“Let’s go home now, Mom.” I laugh it off.

The steel door closes behind me and locks as I leave the psych ward and snaps inside it all delusions of visitors. I see it now: I never died and because of it they were absolved. Of guilt, of duty, of standing around me in cheap suits, faking apologies, lying through the lilies on their chests.

Those encircling me in funeral fashion disappear now at the first sign of life, laid bare to shrivel away, their lame apologies drying up inside them at the first brush with sunlight. They were the ones dying, not me. I also mute the voices around me prattling on about weight and genetics and politics and logistics and directions to the intensive outpatient clinic and everything else that shouldn’t matter once you’ve made it to the other side of that door.

The pleasant shroud lifts to reveal another chance, a solitary, but stable step out. Now that I’m leaving the shadow of the valley of death, I know it for sure: I am alive. Alive with no chance but to climb. Alive with no visitors and no need for them. Hopeful because I have to be.