The stab in my arm wouldn’t begin to ache for another few hours. The nurse had little chat or maybe I had become so accustomed to my injection that it blurred into a casual three minutes of life.
I was the first to arrive in the hospital that morning, the new hospital—or at least a new hospital building—and was seen in short order to get a shoulder full of medicine. It seemed no less normal than buying pads, toothpaste, and pain pills, but as I sat, with the waiting room filling up, the tiredness of the faces stood in stark contrast to the clean white and yellow walls, the scrubbed grey tiles on the floor, and the commonplace feeling their haggard looks caused to depart from me.
I had been attending hospitals, new and old, for over a decade but this was the first time, or at least the first time I could remember—in non-disordered thought—where I looked at the other patients and felt real, frightful worry slip into my mind.
The patients were mostly older, although a few people looked to be just barely adults. The elderly patients all had a mismatched look, as though their minds and their bodies weren’t in full coherence. One woman’s clothing was loose, light and frayed and gave the impression of bedclothes, or a more formal nightie. Her face was layered with dark mottled spots but most intimidating was the look in her eyes, as though she was afraid of ghastly spirits hanging on the edge of perception, making pains to torment her.
Any time I’d worried previously it was about being seen as mad, being seen in a place of madness, but I almost recoiled on seeing that woman. I knew I held perfectly still on my bench seat, unmoving, but my worries weren’t about what I was, or what I was seen as, but about what I could become. Her fear was transformed into my fear of what this hospital meant, what my illness portended.
What teased at my fright most was the realisation I’d never felt this way before and that spoke to me about how caught up in myself I had been. How tired, mad, apprehensive or simply imperceptive I was through all my other visits. It was entirely possible this was just a random chance, happenstance in coming across a woman fleeing her own fears but looking at the other people confirmed to me such a thought could come from any of those sat around me.
I turned my eyes to look at a man with grey pants, a flopping, tired flatcap, and a worn woolly jumper despite the mild summer. The jumper had holes ripped into it, or strands of wool separated and run loose leading to tears where you could see through to a stained vest beneath. A woman sat next to him, who I imagined was his sister such was the inattention between them. She looked almost reticent in being there, and I knew she could very well be his tired wife. I prayed to myself I would never end up in a relationship like that. Still I felt the distance between all the people in my life, alone as I wanted to be in that waiting room, alone as I was in all, and that was part of the fear of what my future held.
A doctor walked around the corner and called out a name—not mine—and a young woman stood, hand trailing behind her as it held onto her mother’s. “You can join us if you want, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy,” the doctor said. And the young woman seemed to get smaller as she moved towards her standing, sorrowful guardian.
I felt another twinge of fear running through me. I reassured myself decades had to pass before I came to a worn-down age, like the elderly around me, and something frightening would have to happen before I retreated to maternal protection. I knew illness could strike without reason but my passable life was nothing to find worry over.
Time passed with me not looking at my phone, not reading the posters on the wall, and barely hearing the few short words shared between the other waiting patients.
Another person was called in by a doctor, then another, and I began to wonder if I had been missed by the receptionist seeing as I was the first person to arrive to the waiting room.
When another person was called in I stood and went to the front desk and asked if I had been registered.
The young receptionist barely looked up, instead looking towards a sheet of paper, and said, firmly, “The consultant will be seeing you next.”
I hadn’t seen a consultant since I’d been attending the day hospital years before but I didn’t feel worried or wonder why she wanted to see me. Instead I treated it as a simple fact in life that I was about to see the doctor in charge.
Sitting in the waiting room nothing filled my mind. Thoughts half formed but there was no solid story to grasp onto, no tale I could spin out for myself about what I would be doing that day, what could occupy me, or what I should do with my freedom. I knew if time kept spooling out I’d become annoyed and tired but that was more over the hardness of the steel bench than it was over the denial of opportunity for anything else. My day was entirely my own.
The first doctor I saw take a patient came out again and called another name not mine.
I waited, and nurses, in more casual clothing than the doctors, passed back and forth occasionally checking in on the patients they recognised.
I was about to sigh, almost petulantly aloud, when I saw who I vaguely remembered to be the consultant standing at the edge of the corridor’s corner. She didn’t call my name, didn’t really move towards me, just stood there and I knew from her gaze she was waiting for me.
I rose, then followed her to her office, a bigger, permanent one for a consultant, with a large solid-wood desk, and half-height bookshelves against two walls, filled as they were with plastic bound manuals.
“What do you think of our new building?” she asked.
“It doesn’t have the character of the old one,” I said.
“I’m wondering what I’ll do with this office. It needs something,” she grimaced as she spoke. “Just something more.”
She set aside the file she carried on the sidetable next to her desk. She had no notes or notepaper in front of her. “How have you been?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said. There wasn’t much more to say. My days were just generally, generically fine.
“You must be doing something,” she said.
“I’m building a bookshelf this afternoon.”
“You’re a reader?”
“It’s actually for my journals. Well, one shelf at least.” I realised I hadn’t answered her question. “But yes. I’m sick of heaping books on the ground. I want somewhere to display them.”
“What do you read?”
“Nothing at the moment, really. I’m writing instead,” I said. I felt a blush rise in my face over admitting that. I’d said it to my parents but they took all of my endeavours with nonchalance, for good reason. Anything new I tried occupied me for a few weeks and then I moved on.
“What are you writing?”
“It’s about schizophrenia,” I said. I felt the blush rise again.
“A memoir? They say we all have a book in us.”
“I don’t think I could write about myself, everything is so vague, especially when I attended the day hospital. I don’t really remember any of it.”
“Non-fiction then,” she said.
“I’ll leave that to the doctors. No, it’s fiction. About recovery, inability. Disability, I suppose is better. A man who fears he’s never lived up to anything, especially not ideas of masculinity as he waits at the bus stop, unable to drive because of his eyesight, surrounded by elderly woman with shopping, seemingly mocking him. I’ve just started it, and it’s something to do now but if it goes nowhere I’m fine with a few weeks of trying something new.”
“You should stick with it.”
“I’ll try to. I’m halfway through.” Words and enthusiasm I had denied myself spilled out with someone taking an interest. “But I’ve spent so much of my life thinking things will always be something more, something better, or even worse. I don’t take things as they come, I’m always flying from one thing to another, so I’m just going to write when I can, a little every day and see where I go.”
“You seem to have this worked out,” she said.
I laughed. “That’s something I can’t tell myself. It would only be pretending, or fooling myself if I thought I did.”
“There’s something worked out right in that,” she said. She sat forward in her chair, uncrossing her hands from her lap. “Do you remember me when you were in the day hospital?” She turned sideways to the file and flipped a few pages. “Wow, over three years ago. Time flies.”
“No,” I said. “Not really. Maybe. I don’t remember much from then. At least not clearly, just the feeling of it.”
“What’s the feeling you remember?”
“Frantic,” I said. I didn’t elaborate that it was invigorating. Something I’d like to be dosed on for a few hours or days at a time. The energy I’d felt, so lacking in my life in that moment, that pushed me towards discovery and newness however little I appreciated it. However little I could fathom it. However little I could control it. “It was energetic, I felt pushed along by every thought I had. Now everything feels so stable.”
“Stable is good.” She nodded for emphasis as she spoke, and I’m not sure if she grasped onto the longing in my words and chose to ignore it, or if she was just focused on me saying an important keyword like, ‘Stable.’
“How’s your relationship with your family?” she asked.
“Normal, I guess. We talk most weekends, I visit them every so often. They treat me with the usual familial pressures.”
“In what way?”
I felt uneven at betraying them but it was a truth I had to express. “Typical family stuff. They think I can achieve more. I’m not too sure how to tell them how up and down my life is, at least not in a way they believe.”
“How’s your mother?” the doctor asked.
“She’s good.”
“I’m sure she can understand what’s happened with you. She was very worried when we met.” It dawned on me that this was the same consultant I had seen when I was most mad. Who had said I was to live with my family until I had recovered some stability.
“I don’t think they understand that a little upset in my life, just not getting enough sleep, for just one night, can have my thoughts all over the place by the next night. That I can be paranoid just reading a website.”
“You need to ensure you sleep properly then,” she said, simplifying everything. I expected another routine based on sleep hygiene and before-bed activities, but as she continued on I didn’t get that, or at least not what I was expecting. “Sleep is about activity, but I’m sure someone’s told you all about exercise and its benefits. But activity is more about being occupied in life, having something to fill your days with and a reason to need to sleep.”
“Writing is that for the moment,” I said. “And I’ve picked up a few basic programming tasks.”
“What kind of tasks are these? Contracting?” It wasn’t that her face was impassive, more that her emotions were close and withdrawn, but I could still see what was worry, or maybe more interest somewhere within.
“Well, they’re open source. It’s community efforts, not something you’re paid to do.”
“A job would be something to look into. Something that does pay.”
I didn’t want to get into the slight stress I felt from keeping up with the things I’d already engaged with. It was almost unnoticeable compared to what I’d been through before, but it was enough to remind me of what could blow me off course. “I feel like my plate is filled at the moment,” I said.
“It’s something to look into. It’d be good for you. Money means more freedom.”
“I know,” I said. She nodded. I knew it deeply but in that moment, those past few weeks and months, and even years I felt an accord with what little I had. I wanted more but I didn’t feel I could deserve more. Not without giving into anger.
“Is there anything that’s particularly bothering you at the moment?” she asked.
Normally, at a psychiatric appointment, when that question was asked it was part of the rote of questions that were traded off to tick all the boxes. After the conversation I’d had, however, it felt like an actual question. I thought on what I was doing with my life, what had been happening over the past few weeks and knew there was nothing that I could justifiably complain about. “I just want all this to keep going,” I said.
“So you’re happy with yourself?”
“Not exactly happy. I don’t think I could be happy for a long stretch of time. I’m not sure happiness—as a state—can, or should, stay with anyone for a long time. I’m just—I don’t know—things seem to be occurring and I’m dealing with them. Life is continuing, I’m coping with it, and maybe even a little more than coping. Maybe I feel like I have ambitions, or am allowing myself to think of them.”
“That’s good. That’s the right place to be,” she said. “Is there anything you want from us, from the hospital? Is there anything we could offer to you?” she asked.
“Another appointment in three months?” I said.
She smiled with just a little less reservation than what had masked her face for the past few minutes. “Three months,” she said. “And keep going. I can see how well you’re doing.”
Walking out from the hospital, appointment letter in one hand and cigarette in the other, I thought on all the questions not asked. There was no question over socialisation, nothing about voices, no question about harming myself. She didn’t even have me list off the medication I was taking.
Walking down the freshly tarmacked hospital driveway I looked at the new stone and glass buildings lining the footpath. In one of them would be the day hospital for people in acute situations. One of them would be hosting people, for daily check ups and groups, people who were in the midst of a crisis. My mind felt far away from that, far, even, from the agitation that came with tiredness, or worry, or paranoia.
I kept my walk even and steady, and I eventually made it to the exit of the new hospital. My life was slow, slower than I ever would have predicted when I was a teenager, and glacial compared to the weeks following my psychosis.
I didn’t know which of the buildings held the day centre. If I came to it again it would be the circling of illness, a contention always a part of me, always a possibility. I just knew it wasn’t for me in that moment.
I left the hospital grounds and began to count out a pace on my walk home. Step following step: one then two.
Eventually I lost track.
Index