For
today’s blog post, I decided to share a small snippet of my book, “Thoughts
From A Cluttered Mind,” with you all, after all V is for Vignette. The
story is a journey of my struggle with mental illness, abuse, PTSD and how I
came out the other side, a bit battered and bruised but wiser and ready to take
on the world that was my enemy for so many years.
“Click, slam, click.”
The sound of the door locking terrified me
as I walked slowly down the hall.
“How did I get here?” I said out loud to no
one, the suicide note was just for attention, just so someone would listen and
take me seriously.
I knew that part was only partially true, I
had written the note for attention, but I also knew there was part of me that
was ready to call it quits, Up until that afternoon to the outside world; I
seemed a normal wife and mom. Inside my
mind, however, a storm was brewing, and I was caught in the middle of it. It is these feelings and realizations that
ran through my mind as I walked through the front doors of the psychiatric
hospital that late July night. I had
reached the bottom, and found myself admitted to the mental hospital, I say
call it what it is, a place for those who were crazy and couldn’t deal with
reality, at least’s that how I felt as I walked down the hallway.
I wouldn’t get any answers from anyone
tonight. Their only concern was keeping an eye on me, so I didn’t make another
suicide attempt. Tomorrow I would see
about getting out of here; this was a misunderstanding. A million thoughts ran through my head as I
stared at the cold white ceiling, maybe if I just go to sleep, I will wake to
find this to be a bad dream.
It would be a night of interrupted sleep;
my mind playing back the movie of my life and what I was seeing terrified me, I
couldn’t escape it. The memories had
started, and I was nowhere near ready to face them. Instead I sat on the hard
mattress and wrote, the words flowing out of me like a waterfall.
(journal entry) So, I hid. I hid behind the
walls thinking I was safe from the outside world, but I was not. I was safe only from myself, for the time
being. I liked the comfort of knowing I
wasn’t alone, that people understood me. Outside the walls, the windows, behind the shades
and curtains, there was a world that could not understand the confines of my
brain. They will never know what it’s
like to sleep at night and pray you won’t wake up, that the loneliness will be over,
and I would understand the truth that was in my mind. Instead, I would wake up and find nothing has
changed; I was alone. I still had the
desire for some sort of normalcy, and that I feared would never come. If it did, would I notice it? How could I?
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