Back in school, always surrounded by friends, I never thought I would end up living alone. I never thought that I would end up something of a recluse, a modern-day hermit, leaving the house only for groceries or to see my parents. I was ill. Ill was the term people used when they didn’t want to say they had psychiatric problems. They hid it because when you end up ill for no other reasons than chance, genetics or sustained mental stress, you don’t get as much respect as people who are mentally ill for other reasons such as using drugs or playing violent sports that left you with brain injuries from multiple concussions.
In school there were guys who were into drugs. I almost never did drugs, but when I went out for a smoke, they would share their wild adventures. LSD, mushrooms, pot, hash, glue, painkillers, uppers, downers. Even cocaine, and all of those could be mixed with large or small quantities of alcohol. Self-induced insanity. The important thing for them was that they held on to their experiences of getting high, stoned, wasted — as a badge of honour.
I loved to hang out with my brother’s best friend, Darcy. He lived out of town and always told these hilarious stories like the time a cop went by him really slowly in his patrol car. Out of fear and possibly drug-induced paranoia, he swallowed his considerable stash of hashish and ended up zoning out, wrecked beyond comparison, lying in a ditch for hours. It had all seemed like so much fun, and all these chemically deviant experiences brought a lot of people together. The jocks and preppies all started using drugs in high school, and it cut down a lot on the rivalry, insults and violence between them and the heads.
And then there was me. Clean cut, often wearing either a collared shirt with dress pants and polished shoes, and sometimes even a tie. All my money went into my cars, but the illness took that pleasure away from me, too. About a year before I got really sick, I found a killer deal on a ten-year-old Mustang. From the moment I laid eyes on it I was more in love with it than any high school crush. It had the curves, the engine, the spoilers and the hood scoop that set me apart from everyone else driving even new cars at my school. And I drove it to pieces doing stunts, racing, taking trips out of town. I scared anyone who rode in that car with me to death. It was crazy what I would do in that thing. My friends said I had a death wish. They were closer to the truth than any of them knew. Those were some pretty fun days. Until. Until.
It is so hard to describe a mental illness to someone who hasn’t experienced it. I guess it can be sort of like being on a bad trip after smoking pot, some really nasty stuff that you don’t even know might have been laced with something stronger. You get all paranoid, and it seems everyone wants to kill you or harm you. But there’s more things that go wrong, on top of the fact that the effects in rare cases may never wear off.
My illness began when I was 18. I had this idea in my head that I could make myself into what I felt was the quintessential perfect person, someone with an extreme work ethic and superhero-like dedication to helping others. I tried to be the best student in my school, the hardest worker at my job, I would do anything, sacrifice anything for even the slightest need of others. I had based all of this theory on a guy I didn’t really know who rode the University bus I took to visit my brother and sister. He wore a t-shirt that said “Navy” on it and had seemed to be a total giver, embodied with pure altruism and professionalism. Thinking I could be like him, I would often do things like stay up all night reading and push myself at school, push myself at work.
I can’t even catalogue all the things that went wrong. I slipped deep into a psychosis. My mind was a fragile egg that had been launched at the side of a building and was broken and running loose. The next months were a rollercoaster of arrests, hospital admissions and violence. Not to mention being locked inside a psychiatric ward where the patients are seriously ill and the staff are jaded and violent.
Flash forward ten years later and I was 28, alone, and my life hadn’t improved much. I did have a little money, a cheap car, a tiny apartment. It had been so long since I saw my psychiatrist that I started to believe I was no longer ill. It took some time before I slipped out of reality again. The first thing that happened was that I cut my dose of medication in half thinking it would allow me to function better. I would live to curse that decision a thousand times over. Slowly, surely, I started to fall deep into madness once again.
My delusions came in tricky, strange forms. There was a young woman who seemed to always surface in my worst times of psychosis. The fact that she hadn’t said two words to me in 15 years didn’t faze me. “Show me a sign,” I would say to the transmitter that had been implanted in a filling. “If you are out there, send a message to me over the radio,” I whispered. Then, clear as a bell, the announcer would come on and I heard him reply.
“Okay.” And, thoughts racing, I slipped off into sleep.
The idea that some young woman who could do anything was out there and in love with me was traumatizing. I felt under control, even though somewhere, in what was left of my ‘mind,’ I knew it wasn’t true. But somehow, on the surface, it all seemed so disturbingly real.
It wasn’t long after that when I was soon taken to get the help I so desperately needed, the crisis response team. They brought me to the hospital and something didn’t seem right. All of a sudden, I didn’t want to be a patient. I backed out of the waiting room. As soon as I was outside, I bolted. That bought me five months on the locked ward. Five months of my life. Gone.
When you are in a hospital like that, one of the most important things you can have is a friend. I had a few, but it seemed that the nursing staff wanted to discourage anyone from trusting me. Still, there were people, both staff and patients, whom I had known for years outside of the hospital. The main problem I had with the nursing staff was that I saw myself as a prisoner being punished. I had no desire to do what they told me and was resentful that they treated me like a child. The psychiatrist was even worse. He left me to rot month after month. One time when he did see me, he told Jenny, a sadistic older nurse that at the first sign of problems I was to be put into the seclusion room.
Time and again, I was put in the isolation room more than anyone else on that ward. Sometimes I would be put there for swearing, sometimes for raising my voice. Sometimes there wasn’t a reason. It broke me down so far that after leaving that place I was almost totally non-functioning.
Mornings were often difficult. When you take medications there, they increase your dose to get you stabilized faster. Waking up is hard, but when you have psychosis it is horrifying. I was a heavy smoker then, and I would do my best to go to sleep when the smoking room closed and wake up when it opened. I often woke up before it opened, and as I sat there watching the news, the TV would talk to me. The news anchor would drone on and I would lose my concentration and it would seem as though he was talking about me killing people or owning the TV network he was on. Then cigarettes would be doled out and I would smoke one and the voices started to calm down. After another, and another, I would feel somewhat close to normal. You will often see mentally ill people chain smoking for this very reason. Somehow, nicotine affects some of the same neuro-transmitters that enhance the negative symptoms of delusions and hallucinations.
One day, after being in that place for maybe four months, she, Belinda, in patient clothing was sitting in the smoking room, looking hurt and alone. There was something about her. Something that told me she was more than the older, irritable, and often angry woman no one seemed to be able to make friends with. Something told me that she was someone special.
The first thing I did when I saw her was go to the coffee room and make two cups. I went back to where she was sitting, set down a coffee for her, smiled and sat down across from her. She was older, had a fair bit of wrinkles, and it looked like she had a terrible beating. Underneath it all, I had this idea in my head that she was the young woman I knew since childhood. I was wrong of course, she wasn’t even remotely like her.
When I sat down, she said, “Listen man, I don’t know who you are or what you want, but I’m married and I’m 42 years old.”
“Do you want any cream or sugar in your coffee?” I asked. She didn’t answer, but let me sit there as we had our coffees.
I don’t know how I managed it. I just kept on being as nice as I could be, talking to her for those long, wasted hours that you can either fill with worry or conversation. We became close friends. And then her husband came to visit.
I met him, and shook his hand and wondered if he had been the one who had given her the bruises she had when she came in. Either way, I didn’t know what to do or say. My voices told me she didn’t have much time left on this Earth and that she liked me a lot more than her husband.
A few days after her husband’s visit, a nurse came up to me.
“I want you to stay away from Belinda.”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t care what they thought. We were friends. Maybe we were even more than friends. When you spend a lot of your life in places like that you pretty much end up thinking you are a useless human being. Staff members (like the one I just talked to) only made it worse.
Belinda and I started writing letters to each other. When I wrote back to her, I would compose little poems and talk about knowing her from before. I no longer cared that they were going to try and keep me on that locked ward for a very long time. She was there. Belinda. Only my second girlfriend ever in 28 years.
Two days later Belinda was discharged from the hospital and I stayed on the locked ward. They had won. They had beaten every ounce of defiance out of me in multiple trips to the side room and their five on one wrestling matches that ended with me being injected with some kind of tranquilizer. They had let me rot in that hospital, not helping me at all with my medications or allowing me to handle my banking. They made sure that I would leave that place broken mentally and financially. And now they made sure I would also leave alone.
A few weeks later, I got a lucky break. My psychiatrist took a few days off and I convinced his replacement to see me. I tried to explain everything, I even told him about how my medications were working when I was out of the hospital, how I had just stupidly changed the dose. He saw no need to keep me away from medication that worked, and I quickly stabilized. Not long after, he had me transferred to an open ward. The psychiatrist who had kept me as a prisoner for the crime of having an illness? He was later promoted to head psychiatrist of the whole massive complex.
One morning I was walking by the TV room, and there was a picture of a very tall building with smoke coming out of it. I went inside to see what was up and though it seemed very surreal, another jumbo jet flew into the tower and it began to collapse upon itself. It was like watching a bad movie. I didn’t really seem to care much that this was happening. I didn’t conceive of the loss of lives in the tower and on the ground. I went back to my room, laid down and listened to the radio for the rest of the morning. Reports came in of other attacks on the Pentagon and of the Americans closing the border, thousands of flights being cancelled. Me? I was indifferent. When the first Persian Gulf War happened, I spent most of the time it took place going through extensive testing at the Canadian Armed Forces Recruiting Centre. I was ashamed of myself and wanted to somehow regain my honour.
Since I was young I had always glorified the military. I had even spent three years in Air Cadets. Now there was another war coming, battles to be fought. But as I thought about those two towers collapsing and all the fallout that would come from it, I took some comfort in knowing that these were no longer my problems. My problem was getting out of there and somehow finding a way to rebuild my life.
A few weeks later, with some medications, an appointment with a doctor, I was released. At first I didn’t feel much like leaving. In a way I had started to feel at home in the hospital. There was very little in society for me. I opened the front door, looked at the parking lot and, to my surprise, there was a 1978 Mustang parked right in the middle of the pedestrian exit. It looked a little rough around the edges, some rust, a couple of scratches, but, somehow, I knew whose car it was. It was mine. It was the very same precious little sports car that made me the envy of my whole high school. It was the last thing I had ever owned that meant anything to me. I walked up to take a look at it and to talk to the person driving it. It was just too much of a coincidence.
I leaned in the passenger window and there was Belinda. She looked great. She had dyed and styled her shoulder length hair, she had a beautiful summer dress on, her bruises had healed and, above all, she looked happy.
“Get in Mike,” she said, and I slipped into the passenger’s seat.
“Belinda! I thought you went back to your husband. I thought you loved him and that you didn’t want to get involved while you were in such a vulnerable state. Your last letter…”
She said nothing. But she looked at me, looked in my eyes. I could tell something was wrong. She took off her sun glasses, and I could see that she had a very serious black eye that could have even caused damage to her vision. All at once I knew we needed each other.
“Let’s go,” I said, and we drove for a long time.
We didn’t really know what to say to each other, we were silent for a while. Then all the pent-up pain and anguish of the past months caught up with us and we opened up, tears in both of our eyes. Through all our anguish, we formed a plan. First, we headed West for the coast. I had all my worldly belongings with me anyways, and she had nothing to go back to. Once we left the city, she got out and let me drive. The car felt so incredible as I felt the leather covered steering wheel and the V-8 engine propel us down the highway. I already started to feel like a human being again.
Life on the coast wasn’t easy. We ended up living in a cottage that Belinda had rented from a friend. I filled most of my days working odd jobs for neighbours, and working on the Mustang when I could find the time. Belinda filled her days with crafts, making wine, tending her garden. Once a month we would go into town to get groceries and medications. Somehow, I think she knew that I didn’t really know who she was. We weren’t really in love in any romantic way, we were just close. Our evenings were filled with board and card games and CBC radio. We would do crosswords puzzles together and read passages from books we wanted each other to experience. I have to admit things started out awkward. Often, I would be playing a game of crib and it would almost feel as though all the energy and life force was drained out of me. I looked at her and didn’t know who she was, what we were doing in that place. All I really knew was that I thought she was someone from my past — but as my thoughts began to ‘heal’ as time went on, I started to understand she wasn’t any more than what she told me, but I didn’t care. She was, in reality, a middle-aged, abused older woman who fell for my misdirected charms.
When these feelings rolled through my mind, I would stop whatever I was doing and walk out to the porch and smoke and try to gather my thoughts. As I stood there, drinking in the beauty and the solitude of our remote hideaway, I would try to process everything. Often, though, I didn’t have to tell Belinda what was going on in my head. She would just walk up behind me, set her head on my shoulder and hold me. Just knowing another human being somehow understood my pain sent waves of respite and happiness through me. For a brief moment I could fantasize that she was indeed the one from my past. It never lasted.
Then, one time it happened again, and I walked away from the table, this time in the middle of eating. I was in a deep funk of sadness, almost to the point of nausea, and she came up behind me and did something no one had ever done before — she ran her fingers through my hair and opened the snaps on the front of my shirt and let her other hand explore my chest and stomach. Somehow in that moment it didn’t matter to me who she wasn’t. She was mine, and I was hers. I finally saw her as a living, breathing human being who loved and laughed and hurt just like me. I had already formed a bond with her. It was easy to cultivate those seeds of caring into a bloom of love, real heartfelt feelings of empathy and caring for someone outside the locked box that was my head. I never had any of those feelings for my schoolboy crush, or even for my first girlfriend. After talking and drinking wine, that night, we clumsily made love. It was a kind of mutual, caring lovemaking that I had never known until then. From there on she was mine, and I was hers.
I still slipped into my moods. I still shut down when life was embarrassing or difficult. I blamed those times on my illness and my inability to relate to others. But, through it all, Belinda was there. To talk to, to occupy my thoughts and see to my needs. Sometimes, as the bright morning sun broke through our silent world of dreams, we would just hold onto each other and marvel at the things we had been through and try not to think about the things our illnesses and situations took from us. Finally, far away from the world and its judgements, I was home, and my reality was better than the delusions that had haunted me for such a long time.
