A Vague Timeline Of My Hospitalisation
A major trigger warning for graphic descriptions of self-harm, aggression, drug misuse, paranoid thoughts and general disturbing themes.
DAY 1
I didn’t sleep last night. I have to cancel my DBT because I feel like shit and want to rest. I didn’t manage to get any more sleep over the course of the day - I feel miserable.
At least, I was feeling miserable until out of absolutely nowhere I suddenly felt fuelled by energy and a brain that wouldn't slow down. I started to hear my thoughts overlapping and felt every one was original - I had so much to talk about! My family noticed I was speaking more rapidly than normal with more to say, and I was in a really good mood. I facetime my boyfriend from 8pm - 12:30am. He hardly gets a word in. I get angry when he falls asleep because I still had more to say. My jaw hurts from speaking but I still feel like I need to keep speaking - some unknown force is pushing me on.
I try to sleep that night. I take 9mg of melatonin, 1000mg valerian root and and a fuck ton of CBD oil in the hopes I don’t have to rely on my dodgy street benzodiazepines. To no avail, all that happens is I have my eyes closed for around 2-3 hours while my thoughts are rapidly overlapping and occasionally I start to ascend into believing I am extremely important and unique. All I develop is a headache and a very faint feeling of fatigue that is overrun by my body.
DAY 2
It’s 4am. I decide not to keep pushing for sleep. I know it won’t happen. My thoughts will not slow without the use of benzodiazepines and I’m trying to stop using them. And I still feel great anyway.
So I get up, start to deep clean my room, do my makeup as avant-garde as I can so it takes as long as possibly, and make tiktoks for 8 hours straight. Yes. And then suddenly I started to feel extremely agitated. Paranoia was shadowing me. I felt the possibility of being watched - not that I was being watched, but just a hint of fear that came in waves. My body was exhausted. My brain was not. I needed to sleep. I needed as many hours as I could get.
I wake up from a very light sleep, the type of sleep where you feel you’re just on the verge of falling asleep, thinking it must’ve been at least 5 hours. I look at the time. An hour and a half. My head hurts from the Valerian Root. I’m also developing a fever from a possibly transient bug. I’m exhausted. I’m getting physically unwell and the way I’m going is not good.
I’m extremely chatty with my mum. She notices. She says that I’m hypomanic. I complain when she won’t let us get into a deep conversation because she wants to nap. I facetime my boyfriend again from 8:30 to 12:30pm. He gets even less of a word in. He discourages me from using the benzodiazepines but I know it’s for the best.
I spend the rest of my money on packages. (Around 40 came during the time I was sick.)
That night, impulses get the best of me, thoughts of being a higher power circulating in my mind as I carve a cheshire smile into my face. I don’t know what the thought behind it is. I don’t know if there was a thought - I probably just ‘wanted to.’ I have never done anything like this. And then I realise I should probably nip this in the bud, and take one of my benzodiazepines. It doesn’t touch me. It’s very strong stuff. I take another one. I am able to drift off into a sleep that should approximate 14 hours....
DAY 3
It was 8. It was 8 hours almost precisely and this morning as soon as my eyes opened the energy burst into my body and into my mind, like I’d already done away with the long-acting benzo. Not a trace in my system.
I try to hide my face from my family - like a fun game of hide & seek. They notice. They tell me I need to call the crisis team. I roll my eyes but I like the attention. I call the crisis team - I tell them I don’t think I’m in a crisis but my mum is making me call them. I get very aggressive over the phone, shouting at them occasionally for not understanding my tangential flight of speech.
They ask to speak to her. Meanwhile I stare into the mirror as the strongest wave of pure, relentless euphoria hammers me like the warmest most aggressive hug I’d ever had. It was better than any drug I’ve done. It was absolutely incredible. Tears fall from my eyes from how good I fucking feel - and it’s all mine.
I decide to do my makeup even more avant-garde, to grace everyone’s presence at the crisis hub as my higher power thoughts are slowly turning into delusions - I’m aware at this point, but I still believe it to a degree. I cut my face again because it wasn’t symmetrical enough yesterday. I smile and laugh in joy while I do it. The energy inside of me is far too much for any human being to contain, this stupid vessel, and I need to get it out. I burn my arm with a naked flame to feel something. It hurts but it makes me shiver and smile. I’ve never done that before.
The crisis team wants to see me. I spend 3 hours patronising and being verbally aggressive to the woman in front of me. I raise my voice at times and shout. I almost lose control. I feel divine now. I rapid cycle through rage and euphoria like its a contest.
My parents come in to tell her what they think the issue is. They speak about me with disdain and disgust. I laugh almost hysterically because it feels appropriate to me. Everybody looks at strangely. Why am I laughing? Because it’s all a fucking joke.
I get offered a bed as an inpatient. Music sounds amazing. I want to dance. My legs don’t want to stay still. I am waiting for the doctor to see me so I find myself walking around until 5am, dancing in the lounge to the most energetic music I could find. I make a friend. We bond immediately and talk for hours, but when she starts speaking I feel irritable because I should be the one talking. I have so much to offer.
I see the doctor. My ideas are racing and I keep going on tangents and when I need to be silent my eyes find other things to do, my head bouncing around with curiosity like a small child. My throat feels like it’s in pain - might even be bleeding - all from talking.
I cannot remember what happened after this. All the days mix into a blur.
DAYS 4 ONWARDS
I black out. It gets worse. My chronological timeline is nonexistent. I am missing a chunk of my life that I will never get back. I will recount what I do know.
My ideas are amazing. I write pages and pages and pages nonstop of poetry, of diary scrawlings, of fiction writing. This occupies all of my alone time. My beliefs of being a higher power get so intense I feel that I have to start my own religion. I start thinking of ways to go about it, how to convince people to be my followers. I forget and go on to the next idea.
My first ward round with the psychiatrist, I remember the anger deep within me. The slightest patronising tone which I could usually withstand sent me over the edge - I screamed at him, threw my phone across the room (I am usually very cautious with my phone) and slammed the door behind me, kicking walls, punching walls, before collecting myself and going back in. And it happened again - I ran out, fell onto my knees on the floor ripping my hair out and just started screaming like I’d never screamed before, all the anger inside me just unleashing itself like a demon into this world. I do not like causing a scene like that. I do not like being out of control. A support worker took me outside to calm me down. My moods were swinging rapidly so within moments I was feeling ok again, though the agitation lived on in me.
Beyond that, I can only recall moments of constant pacing and agitation, a need to hurt others and myself from the anger that felt a tiny trigger away from exploding out of me. Memories of head banging, a bruise on my head, a chronic headache. The impact of my fist against the wall, the knuckle on my middle finger swelling to double its size and possible fracturing. The discolouration, the purpling and yellowing and greying of my entire hand. The agony of scalding hot water being poured on my hand so I could feel high, powerful, filled with adrenaline. I remember being filled with uncontrollable white hot rage, only fulfilled by violence, as I grabbed a pen (the nearest sharpish thing in the ward) and just stabbed and stabbed and stabbed myself in the arm in fury. I’ve never done any of this before. I trashed my room, throwing everything everywhere - again, I’m cautious about my things and this was a very out of character action for me. During a particularly bad rage episode while lucid I might throw something not prone to breaking or making a loud noise, but I am never violent. Possibly the scariest was during a fit of rage I recall trying to break a psych ward mirror, being hysterical and finding the nearest sharpest object being a piece of plastic. I drew it across my throat. I tried to plunge it into my neck three times. I did not succeed - thank god.
This plastic though, I used it to cut my face back open so it could look symmetrical. And when it was finally symmetrical, when my face was bleeding I felt alive - I felt fulfilled. I looked special, different, like the invincible higher power I was. The scars still haven't healed and are still a little visible with makeup on. Fortunately they are not deep.
One night, I wanted to keep the high going again because I felt so euphoric and I hoarded my clonazepam under my tongue and spat it out. No one would sedate me. I stayed awake all night, feeling high on power and life, doing my makeup to reinforce my all-encompassing beauty and dancing around with headphones on full volume to the most energy-inducing songs I could find. They sounded amazing. Music tickled my brain so well it contributed to feeling on top of the world and invincible. I wrote and wrote and wrote between dancing. The amount I wrote in a night which I spent the entire time dancing seems disproportionate and physically impossible. I stayed awake into the morning, chugging coffee throughout the day to keep it going as high-seeking behaviour. I kept hoarding my clonazepam, my pacing and flight of speech getting out of control. I told myself I didn’t need it - they were just trying to sedate me because they were scared of my power. In the evening I was so agitated that I yelled at the nurses that I wasn’t taking their drugs, I wasn’t going to let them sedate me because they were afraid of my power. The dysphoria of feeling trapped in my own skin, the recurring feeling I felt when I wasn’t on top of the world, intensified to a scary degree. Then after becoming an anxious wreck, I took all my hoarded clonazepam at once because I needed these feelings to stop - I couldn’t bear to be trapped in my own skin, unable to break free and rip myself out of it, any longer. I was closely supervised for a while after that and they changed my benzodiazepine to a less addictive one.
At one point, I started believing certain songs were for me. Florence Welch’s “What The Water Gave Me” was a symbol for my ultimate martyrdom, as was “Seven Devils” which was also a description of ME; I was the Seven Devils. And quite comically, Gwen Stefani’s “Whatcha Waiting For” was a sign to accept the mortality of my body. I felt enlightened, like I’d opened my eyes to a different world. I saw secret messages in a pair of polka dot pants and polka dot socks - I knew the pattern meant something and if I kept thinking about it I’d find the meaning. I was too distractible however to figure out what it meant, my thoughts too filled with ideas I had to start working on now. I screenshotted the image to analyse later.
And then the full break on reality happened. It was mid-cigarette. I was smoking, and then I just felt my brain break - like a switch on my perception turned off. That day I had to hide in my room under blankets, shaking with anxiety, hiding from the windows and sights of others because someone wanted to hurt me. I heard others outside talking, laughing, and I knew they had made up a secret code to laugh about me, taunt me, devise a foolproof plan to harm me that was only a matter of time. I hid from my own reflection in case it was not really me behind the mirror. I was shaking. I could not leave my room. I had to press the alarm to get a nurse to come to me, to escort me safely to the medication counter for my antipsychotic anti-agitation PRN and I was reluctant. This happened twice, two separate episodes of paranoid psychosis. It’s possible my memories have merged both days into one so take the story telling here with a grain of salt.
The only evidence I have of my thoughts are scrawlings,
incoherent scrawlings of my racing thoughts of grandeur, paranoia, persecution.
I can’t recognise the handwriting as my own. When I’m lucid I write underneath
it in my regular handwriting and I am terrified at how different it is, how
it’s never looked before.
I got into my first fight. A new patient came into the ward, purposefully agitating everyone around her, and the rage she filled me with was so cold-blooded I attacked her. And yet the attention she had been giving me, completely focused on me, made me feel invincible and untouchable, superior on every level. The adrenaline I got from it was like a high I’d never felt before - I was smiling like a maniac after it, buzzing with excitement. In that moment I was also afraid of myself. What if I lost control and gave into every violent or homicidal urge I felt during that time?
It was terrifying to feel like someone or something else was inhabiting my body and to lose control of my actions so beyond what I’d ever felt before. I also have borderline personality disorder so am very used to losing control - but it has never been to this extent. I have never felt like a complete passenger in my body, a victim of what the body chooses to do. I sincerely hope I can never experience this again.
And yet, a part of me wants a do-over. To feel those highs again, those insane waves of pure natural euphoria that I’ll never experience with any drug. I cannot describe to you the way it felt. It’s what I imagine methamphetamine might feel like, or the purest cocaine you’ve ever tried without the side effects and now I feel like I can really understand how people get hooked. When you feel a high like that, it changes you for the worse. You know you can never feel that way again without that drug of choice. I’m afraid that if I experience it again, my out of control self will avoid help to keep it going so I can feel that high again.
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