莱夫格雷格森
Between The Tattered Pages of My Mind
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven…”
-John Milton, Paradise Lost
I don’t know if it is the medicine or exhaustion. I have such a battle waking up each day. It is not because I fear what is out my door. I notice that my brain needs dreams just as my body needs sleep, but my medications rob me of dreams. This part of the day, I am closest to madness.
Groggy, foggy, tired, and unintelligible, I wake up, sometimes to stare at my phone, not able to commit to any action. I make coffee, sip it in my easy chair. Despite the wonderful caffeine fix, the fog envelopes me and I slide into the dream world.
I take pills, three times a day. What they do to my health I don’t fully know, but the choice in my case is between unhealthy and insane. I choose unhealthy and believe the drugs are a miracle. Small miracles, but miracles they truly were.
I consume a cocktail of pills plus a bi-weekly injection. Fluoxetine, an antidepressant. Depakene, a mood stabilizer and an explosive diuretic (use your imagination). Oral anti-psychotic. A medication for shaking hands, a benzodiazepine for anxiety. I also take metformin for diabetes, blood pressure medication, a cholesterol pill. Seemingly a toxic mix. But they work. I can’t ride a motorcycle, I can’t stop my hands from shaking, but the pills work. They keep me stable, coherent. They are a solitary staple holding together the tattered pages of my mind that would otherwise be carried away in the winds of madness. They allow me to exist outside of a hospital.
Let’s wind back the clock 40 years. I was on a psychiatric ward at fourteen. At eighteen, in high school, I battled depression and mania. Many distressing and stressful events came together, and I slid downwards into psychosis. Depression was just the prodromal phase, the early warning of things to come. I began having delusions and hallucinations. There were triggers: first, the death of a friend. An unstable home. Working the night shift added to the pressure. Then, violence, arrest and hospitalization on the locked ward of a terrifying complex I never knew of until I was taken there in the back of a police car.
The depths of my desperation were limitless. That place revealed a view of humanity I never imagined existed. There was a loud, brazen woman who kept calling me Vern. There was a man found walking in the snow with no shoes and a grocery bag full of $20 bills. He would fall asleep standing up, his blistered and swollen feet on the floors shared by all. Then there was Derek. He had been admitted while still in school, he liked sports and talking about girls. It was confusing, but in that depth of despair on the locked ward feeling hopeless and unwanted, he reached out to me and showed me something of limitless value.
“Do you like to draw?” He asked.
“Yes, but I’m no good.” I replied.
“Here. Try and draw this.” He handed me a pencil, a blank sheet of paper and a picture of a tiger.
I humored him. But I started to see the lines and representations that were turning my sketch into something that resembled a tiger. I no longer listened to the clock ticking or heard the TV. Just then, Derek said:
“See? Now we’re no longer in a mental hospital.” At first I felt empty there, but with this, it seemed my soul had returned.
A gentle change came over me. My attitude changed. Soon, I was discharged. But without guidance or structure I made mistakes. I drank heavily. I picked a fight in school. I must have made the “spectacle of the year” award in the yearbook. But the seed was sewn. Maybe it was sanity, maybe it was creativity. Maybe it took insanity to draw out creativity. All I know is, flawed and imperfect, my oldest dream came back. I wanted to write.
During one hospital stay I was delusional and said a Hollywood director wanted to have me write the screenplay for his next movie. A ward aide said:
“I challenge you to write one page of a screenplay. One page.”
I did what he asked and wrote that page but threw it out. I wish I could have kept it. Years later, I wrote a short story about someone who escapes from a psychiatric ward, a common theme for patient-writers I learned. It went nowhere. But as the words went from mind to page, I experienced a new joy, a new freedom. In the years that followed, I read all the poetry I could find. I read any novel recommended to me. I wrote reviews of all of them no one would ever see. I saved every cent, sacrificed for months to buy a typewriter. Out of all that darkness a memoir came together.
I truly lived the hermit’s life. Depression overtook me many times. Often, the delicate balance of my pills fell apart. Ten years of isolation and poverty passed, then I had a short voluntary hospital admission, and my prescription was drastically changed. The new meds weren’t helping, so I tried going back on my old ones. My dire situation made me unstable. On urging from my parents, I was taken back to Alberta Hospital. If only the story ended there with me walking in, not being chased down, subdued, given an injection and locked into that dreadful place.
First chance, as I left the ambulance on seemingly good terms, I bolted. “All the Kings horses and all the King’s men” (author unknown) dashed after me as I tried to use my knowledge of the complex to escape. It would be six months before I would leave that place, and even then, only under strict conditions.
When I was discharged, I went to a group home. I found a good one. It meant regular meals, regular exercise, regular medications, encouragement to attend all programs and appointments, and even a little dignity. Perhaps what it gave me most of all was a place where everyone either had a mental health issue or was a staff member trained to deal with one. I was also put in an unsupervised house. All the stigma was gone and finally I could be part of a real community. Then another miracle happened.
A friend, a dear, sweet friend had saved the only known copy of my manuscript. It became Through the Withering Storm, my first book. It sold more than 500 copies. More books followed. Extensive reading and writing on many topics paid off. I was offered work as a writing instructor. I wrote and published magazine articles. I even found the Schizophrenia Society and was hired to give talks about mental health. Miraculously, they were okay with me selling books. Later, I taught poetry for three years at the same psychiatric hospital that once confined me.
Those who are seriously injured carry their scars to their deathbed. Mental illness has injured me and my loved ones in more ways than I can count. Wounds heal. But scars remain. My parents are gone now, but they left this world knowing I found joy and passion and even success. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, writing about the death of King Arthur in “The Idylls of the King” wrote about how we go on, among, “new faces, other minds.” My hope is that when my time to pass comes, that I leave a path to freedom through creativity that other faces and other minds can follow to their own healing and recovery, through the magic of the written word.
