Young Writers Society

The van pulled up outside the unit and I was lead out by the arm, a tight grip. We entered through a back gate that lead on to a corridor. Down the long corridor I could see a window, a dirty window, and behind the window I could see a girl. She looked young, far too young to be on the unit. Her hair was gathered in to greasy clumps and her clothes were too big, too dirty. She looked like a disaster, and I remember thinking that she must be very sick. As we reached the end of the corridor I realised with an abstract horror that the girl was me.

The walls of the unit were sheer faces of glass, showing a broken view of rolling hills and tall, distant fences. At night time you could see right through to the lights of the highway like a looking glass, a vision of the outside. During the day the windows filtered in a perpetual source of light, with small glimpses up to drifting clouds and the occasional indication of bad weather. At the entrance to the ward were two great white doors adorned only with a lurid green exit sign, glowing like a beacon, and a large electric lock. Past those doors was an unseen corridor that lead to unlocked doors and to the outside world, which waited for us silently. Next to the doors were windows which had a view through to a manicured courtyard, a courtyard we were not allowed to be in. Painted in large letters on the wall of the courtyard were three words; Recovery, Hope, and Choice. These words were painted large enough to be seen from any open area in the unit. Inside the unit one could easily envisage an airport terminal; aesthetically pleasing interior decoration without a singular hint of domesticity, and an inescapable air of boredom and anticipation. Everyone was sitting, waiting, and churning, constantly processing the myriad of strange stimuli, the urgent banging of a locked door down the corridor, distant noises of hysteria, the flashing screen of the silent television and the aggressive scent of the brand new, squeaky clean unit. It is too hard to say whether the building made its own impression or if the collective psychosis and desperation turned a hollow shell in to a jail so real and so condescending that it silenced even the loudest of minds, and drove the quiet of mind to a distraction of mockery and torment.

As this was my first time on the unit, I kept mostly to myself. I was terrified of the other patients, and from my room I could hear the sounds of violence and anger all day and night. Even if the unit had felt safe I was in no state to be around people. I was in a frantic state of mind, stuck to the desk with my notepad, clinging to thoughts that were supposed to be fleeting, snagging them hysterically and scribbling them down on endless notepads. I was terrified that if I didn’t write them down, I would be saying goodbye to thoughts that would never come back, never be as brilliant as they had been in the instant my subconscious thrust them forward. I was clutching at my mind as it slipped, no, rushed, away. I was clutching at trains that passed by, with rushes of colours, numbers and phrases that barely made sense, panicking that I would never be able to get it all down, that I would never be able to ball up my mind, in its entirety, and translate it to someone else – to connect completely and be completely understood, to be solidified by someone else’s perception of myself.

I think part of me thought that if I wrote until my hand was cramped and my brain was fried that I could transfer the fear and the pain from my head to the paper, or maybe I would suddenly come across the answer, the illusive explanation for all the black whispering mess in my mind. The problem was that it wasn’t even my pain that I was writing about. I was writing about the pain of others, because I was too afraid at that moment to feel the pain, too afraid of the ultimate questions or life, too afraid to admit that nothing connected, that everything was hidden via a pane of glass, afraid of how the whispering blackness only got closer as life got further away.

I knew that once I had written with vigour, and I longed for the creative inspiration that had driven my messy attempts at fiction in the past. I wanted, like so many authors I admired, to write about the human condition, but I could not, because the condition I knew, the condition I lived, was far from human.

I had decided, as I scribbled away, that one day I would sit calmly, and rationally, and compile these frantic pieces of madness to create something whole to share with the people I loved. Something ordered, chronological, meaningful, complete. As I look back on that time I realise with a rare clarity that the only way to express madness is by the disordered pattern of moments as they come. I could only express myself as I was – a fragmented girl, terrified. There is no way to convey the madness of writing for 24 straight hours, of starving, of counting and bleeding and acting in any way except the way I felt that would ever make any sense or be complete. And perhaps that was for the best, as even as I wrote those words I knew my story had not reached its end.

2 weeks later I was sitting out in the main area of the unit, simply watching the clouds drift past, listening to another patient singing to herself quietly. As my fear had subsided I ventured out of my room, and found something special. These people, the other patients, had once been so scary, but over time I had learned that there was so much to them. In fact, quite problematically, I had come to love these people. In the depths of psychosis, in the throes of aggression, in the sliding slope of heart breaking depression, they were the truest people I’d ever met. All of their ego, their self-consciousness, had been confiscated along with the shaving razors and metal cutlery and they were left completely open. They shared without fear of judgement and spoke with genuine emotion and sentiment. Moreover, no matter their pain they sought comfort from those around them, saw themselves reflected back in the collective madness and were placated by a sense of belonging that existed in no other place they, or I, had ever known. They were mad, and often hostile, but never dull, never boring, never bored.

In contrast the people from outside with their responsibilities and constant connection with reality fell flat in my eyes. They were guarded by so much creation, so many layers of reinforced ceremony and ‘shoulds’. They were filled with talk of money, and weather, and television. Concerned with all the things in life that existed tangibly outside their minds, rather than grappling with the terrifying questions that lay inside. Don’t get me wrong, I loved all of these people equally, I loved each individual made up of stories and idiosyncrasies, it was just that I wished for something different for those living in constructed realities. In essence, I wanted for them to lose their minds too. I wanted to see them pulled and stretched through the ringer of madness so that I could see what lay the deepest inside, see what the madness would show to the world.

My first visit to the unit left me with one of the biggest revelations I had. In my time of frantic writing and obsessive reading I saw that all of the great writers I adored spoke much of their own ‘core’, or of every beings core. They sought to find it, to pick it out and translate it in to text. The problem I saw was that I, just like all of them, would not know the core even if we were to find it, as people so unsure about the decision to live or die know nothing of the core of a continuous existence, for until you commit to one or the other your core is outside, floating on the line between life and death, waiting for a strong breeze to blow it one way or the other.